The Institute of Fine Arts and The Frick Collection Symposium on the History of Art

That cardboard arrived as a recognizable material in early twentieth century works of art is a result of its invention and circulation in a specific commodity form: the cardboard box. However, the relevance of this fact of material history is relatively undertheorized in its appropriations and uses. My paper considers this fact as an opportunity to approach its arrival through the history of its three-dimensional form, which then becomes flattened or folded in works of collage, painting, and sculpture. I argue for this approach in order to generalize its emergence across an anachronistic, but not ahistorical, comparison between the work of Pablo Picasso and the American artist James Castle. Emphasizing the cardboard box as the product of a shared material history between these usually disparate oeuvres, I consider how its three-dimensional structure mutually informed their haptic engagements with the material. In so doing, this paper attempts to read a material across local and social contexts in order to identify broader patterns of formal innovation responsive to commodity production in the first decades of the twentieth century.

The altar screen of St. Albans Cathedral in Hertfordshire, originally built in the fifteenth century, provides a particularly rich example of the cycles of construction, destruction, and reconstruction that must be contended with in much medieval art. The altar-screen in its current form is a forty-foot high, seventeen-foot wide, unpainted stone wall situated behind the altar and filled with gray statues of saints and holy people. It was denuded of its originally colorful medieval sculptures during the sixteenth-century English Reformation and its ornamental canopies were hacked off in the eighteenth century. In the late nineteenth century, the altar-screen was rebuilt with new unpainted statues and decoration.

In 2023, St. Albans commissioned a temporary light show for the altar-screen. In “Saints in Color,” the altar-screen is covered for ten minutes, three times a day, in vividly colored projected light, aligned with each of the sculpted saints in their niches to make it appear as though its original medieval polychromy has been restored. We do not know which colors were used to paint the statues before they were destroyed in the Reformation, nor do we know who was represented in the altar-screen in the fifteenth century, so Saints in Color is a double conjecture.

This paper will ask whether St. Alban’s light show is the future of interpretive information for medieval objects that were once polychromed, or if it is another confusing addition to the altar-screen’s restoration which fills the object with inauthentic colors and saints. What does this layer of speculative, impermanent art add to the altar-screen or take away from it? Does it help the viewer to understand the original experience of viewing the brightly painted medieval altar-screen, or does it tell us more about the present and our understanding of the past than it reveals about the Middle Ages?

In 2014, Kevin McCoy created Quantum, a digital generative artwork that utilized a new medium: the blockchain. Since then, Quantum has been at odds with the hierarchical model of original and reproductions. Quantum is not singular; it embodies a range of representational forms and can take on different manifestations without compromising its identity. Moreover, all manifestations are equal. Centering on the controversy around its translation from one digital context to another, Quantum, I argue, demonstrates a new kind of art object, a decentralized object with no canonical instance, exemplifying a unique logic that demands a novel conceptual framework. Taking us beyond traditional distinctions between visual representation, text, and code and expanding our definitions of authenticity, reproduction, and representation, decentralized objects plot a new horizon in art historical scholarship.

The section on the history of painting in the Dutch art theorist Samuel van Hoogstraten’s treatise Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst, anders de zichtbaere werelt (Introduction to the Academy of Painting; or, The Visible World, 1678) has been rightly interpreted as an effort to reckon with the Dutch iconoclasm of 1566. What has attracted less scholarly attention is Van Hoogstraten’s overwhelming reliance on Byzantine narratives of the history of Christian painting mediated by Counter-Reformation translations from Greek. By tracing the Orthodox and Catholic underpinnings of Van Hoogstraten’s Protestant apologia for images, which originally aimed to grapple with the traumatic memory of the Dutch iconoclasm, this paper reveals how his writing has left a profoundly influential and yet perplexingly unacknowledged legacy on the formation of some of the most fundamental assumptions of the art historical discipline.

Seventeenth-century Dutch artists viewed their own art theoretical literature in secondary status vis-à-vis Italian literature on painting. Asserting his positionality from this quasi-subaltern perspective, I argue, Van Hoogstraten employs an Italocentric, Counter-Reformation account of the history of Christian art only to assert the commonality of the Dutch iconoclastic experience within world history. The account of world art history which he thus formulates casts iconoclasm and iconophilia as two existential forces dialectically shaping humankind’s relationship to images in all societies and at all times—a narrative that set the terms for a vast body of modern art historical writing in which iconoclasm and idolatry appear as the driving mechanisms of historical change. I denaturalize this construct by historicizing its formation in the localized conditions of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, and conclude with observations on how this construct has affected the writing of Islamic art history, a field haunted from its inception by assumptions of iconoclasm.

Analogies between viewing paintings and perceiving reality appear throughout early modern Spanish literature, from sermons to political treatises to popular theater. Whether by stepping closer, looking more carefully, or even reaching out to touch the canvas, the beholder enacted the transition from the false perception of illusion to the rational recognition of truth. Realizing that one has been tricked by an image prompted reflection on the power of deception and the vulnerability of the senses. My observations, drawn from evidence in both images and texts, illuminate a moral-philosophical dimension of aesthetic experience that has not yet been appreciated in scholarship on this period. Moving beyond the significance of narratives and symbolism, viewers found important meaning embedded in the process of looking itself. This essay brings together research from several chapters of my dissertation, in which I examine the role of painting in addressing concerns with distinguishing between appearances and reality. The myriad contexts and implications of this problem of perception coalesced in the concepts of engaño (deception or illusion) and desengaño, which roughly translates to undeception, or discovering the truth through finding out that one has been deceived. Scholars have demonstrated the centrality of this binary in intellectual and literary discourse and have shown that it structured Spain’s responses to the epistemic uncertainty pervading early modern Europe. However, its presence in the visual arts has not been comprehensively investigated. An array of seventeenth-century Spanish sources indicate that the dialectic of engaño-desengaño resonated in the act of looking at art. Some images, in turn, actively invited this comparison by foregrounding the contrast between deception and reality contained within the experience of viewing, thereby heightening the beholder’s awareness of engaño. As a result, I argue, works of art could serve as sites for exercising and formulating correct perception.

Poet and artist, Fran Winant (b. 1943), was one of the founding members of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). Winant began writing poetry in childhood, which addressed and helped her to understand her early lesbian desires. She rightfully feared her poetry being found, and to avoid this, she developed her own language and imagery. She describes these made up symbols as "a metaphor for an inner language of the socially inexpressible". The ‘secret’ language was inspired by Greek mythologies and the history of mathematics, and these symbols are included in many of her works. Other symbolism used evokes imagery of animals, which she says represents the ways in which gay men and lesbians are denied full humanity in a society, and as such, this allows for the "murder" of less visible and underprivileged species.

The artwork functioned as a companion to the poems, which were only publicly distributed alongside the work of the GLF. Indeed, Winant’s artwork and poetry were key materials in the fight for gay liberation. She helped define the role of lesbians in the contexts of gay liberation and radical feminism– as both political and emotional work. Of course, not all of her poetry included drawings or imagery, however, when these were not adjoined Winant’s work still evokes meticulous imagery of her environment. These accounts, however, were some of the most definitive of the early gay liberation movement(s).

Between 1825 and 1838, J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) traveled across Britain to create topographical watercolors for the ambitious engraving project Picturesque Views in England and Wales. Among them is Dudley (c. 1832), a fiery nocturne capturing the manufacturing town in the “Black Country,” an industrial region defined by coal mines, metallurgical works, and pervasive pollution. Turner juxtaposes blazing industrial activity with a fading panorama of church spires and medieval ruins perched on a promontory, itself a hub of extensive coal, iron, and limestone mines. In the nineteenth century, industrial extraction in the district unearthed both raw materials and ancient fossils. In its confluence of fuels and fossils, ancient ruins and industrial works, the landscape that Turner encountered uniquely embodied modernity’s puzzling mingling of past and future, of human and geological history.

This paper reexamines Turner’s feverish image of industrial productivity, shifting the focus from the spectacle of fire to the fuel that powered it. It argues that in Dudley, Turner’s aesthetic and thematic concerns—labor, energy exchanges, and pollution—construct an ambivalent reflection on the shifting power relations within the landscapes of Britain’s fossil-fueled economy. In its juxtapositions and contrasts, the watercolor dramatizes the multiple transfers of power defining coal-fired capitalism: from earth to engines, from feudal institutions to industrial society. At the same time, it reveals the human and environmental losses that accompany this passage.

I argue that, in the composition, Turner responded to Dudley’s tangible ecological and social realities while filtering his vision through the scientific and cultural narratives that defined the district. These included religious interpretations of Britain’s geological wealth, scientific abstractions of its resources, and the social and environmental disruptions caused by mechanization and industrial pollution. Both in the nineteenth century and today, Dudley compels viewers to confront the costs of fossil-fueled progress and the fragility of the landscapes it transforms.

Focusing on paintings and writings George Catlin devised in Central and South America between 1854–71, this paper argues that Catlin’s work mirrors mid-nineteenth century United States imperial aspirations cast onto Caribbean shorelines and its native peoples. Packaging nationalist rhetoric into the transnational, oceanic route of the Gulf Stream, Catlin’s compositions constructed a hierarchy in which some were granted “sight” while others were deemed “seen.” Reading his paintings alongside contemporaneous literature, the phenomenon of ship portraiture, and popular entertainment of panoramas, this paper contends that his work illustrates a form of panoramic vision in which particular people held a divine, omniscient gaze over the Atlantic seaboard. Together, the material carves out an emerging iconography of the Gulf Stream that remains relevant to this day.

The Moravian Pottery & Tile Works, founded in 1899 by Henry Chapman Mercer, is a rare extant example of the ideals and practices of the American Arts & Crafts Movement; namely, preservation of the inherent qualities of natural materials and hand manufacture. Like other workshops and factories associated with this movement, Mercer oversaw the production of handmade artisan tiles as a curative to the encroachment of industrial design and machine manufacture. His lasting influence as a tile maker often overshadows his first career in the nascent field of Americanist Archaeology. I argue that the Arts & Crafts movement was intimately connected to the advent of archaeology in the United States. The proposed paper will analyze specific tile designs and methods of production, revealing that the ideology behind “primitive” design mirrored the scientific objective of early Americanist archaeology. Just as the new professional archaeologists were determined to “age” America, an important component of Mercer’s success as a designer and craftsman was fashionably “aging” his tiles, making them look old through production and finishing techniques of his own invention. These tiles participated in a project of creating a mythical American past through the manipulation, both rhetorical and material, of history. In their most impactful form, Mercer’s historicizing designs operate not as individual images, but as the base of an architectural environment in regionally widespread tile pavements. Still installed in cultural, educational, and political legacy institutions, these pavements perform, through multisensory address, an immersive historicism which continues to wordlessly diffuse the ideological legacy of late 19th century archaeological theories.

The new year in Sicily began catastrophically in 1693 when a devastating earthquake struck the island on January 9 and 11, leaving Catania "flattened like the palm of a hand." As the island’s largest and most ravaged city, Catania became a near tabula rasa for architecture and urbanism. The Spanish Habsburgs, who had ruled Sicily since the sixteenth century, proved ill-equipped to handle the crisis.

Using archival material from the Archivo General de Simancas, this paper reconstructs the immediate aftermath of the earthquake to examine the initial challenges of rebuilding Catania, particularly its fortifications and streets. As a port city facing the eastern Mediterranean, Catania’s damaged defenses raised security concerns for the Spanish Crown. Repairs were entrusted to Carlos von Grunenbergh, a Flemish engineer serving the Viceroy and King Charles II. The medieval city’s narrow, winding streets had caused catastrophic loss of life. In response, the Via Uzeda—a wide, straight thoroughfare named for the Viceroy—was among the first urbanistic interventions, imposing order on the devastated urban fabric and paving the way for further rebuilding efforts.

Set against the backdrop of an unsteady Spanish monarchy culminating in Charles II’s death in 1700, this paper reveals how Sicily, a peripheral territory of the empire, became both a challenge and an opportunity for asserting imperial control. By analyzing political and urbanistic responses to the earthquake, it argues that while disaster created a moment for transformative change, Spain’s inability to manage the crisis from afar left local responses as the most effective means of recovery. This paper highlights how Catania’s rebuilding incorporated adaptive strategies to address environmental risks and how local and imperial governments navigated cooperation and conflict in the wake of catastrophe.

What if socialist architecture in the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) concealed, within their rigid geometries and monumental facades, a latent ambition to reconcile the built environment with the ecological world? Emerging from this perspective, the perceived distinctiveness of a regional site starkly contrasts with the Soviet construction complex's emphasis on standardization and homogenization, thus presenting site-specificity as a curious instance of spatial insurgence.

The case studies foreground architectural practices that engage deeply with both the physical and metaphysical aspects of a site. It explores the tactics Latvian architects employed to disrupt spatial homogenization and to rekindle the tension between the Soviet-built environment and the intricate tapestry of culture, symbolic significance, environmental considerations, and climate peculiarities constituting the site ex-ante.

These cases are situated within the broader cultural landscape of the 1970s. Notably, the first autonomous political opposition in Latvia and in the greater Baltic States during Gorbachev's presidency emerged from the tradition of ecological protest—long occupying a tenuous, semi-tolerated position within Soviet society, rendering it resistant to suppression. By positioning architecture as both cultural and ecological artefact, this paper reframes these sites as agents that actively contributed to and helped articulate a distinct environmental sensibility that became central to the Perestroika-era nationalist movements. This paper contributes to broader discussions on the legacies of socialist heritage, offering a lens through which to explore architecture’s potential to embody attitudes and reinforce connections to place.

This presentation looks at how the entanglements of modernity and globalizing processes have rendered women as voyeuristic spectacle in late 20th century photography in Bombay (now Mumbai). Photography, along with advertising and cinema, produced an urban imaginary of cosmopolitanism and capital through the figure of these women that Andreas Huyssen has termed “cultural engineering” (Huyssen 2008). It both obscures and reveals urban dystopia and labor in the deindustrializing city. I argue that the nostalgic and enchanting trope of women as subjects in photography attempts to fill and overshadow “voids” (Huyssen 1997) of urban decline for a new vision of Bombay, that was simultaneously engulfed by regionalist, right-wing politics.

In recent years, the vast extent of “Black pain” as both an individual and cultural phenomenon has become visible through widespread media coverage of racially-motivated violence in high profile cases, including most famously George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. This coverage has reframed discourses around Black maternal suffering, transforming black mothers into universal symbols of pain and trauma. In response, Black feminist theorists, such as Jennifer C. Nash, have issued a call to move beyond the romanticization and essentialization of Black maternity, to free Black mothers from “the rhetoric of crisis.”

This paper takes up Nash’s call through a close examination of the work of Cuban-American artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons, (b. 1959) whose work counteracts widespread representations of suffering and loss, reframing the Black maternal body through personal narrative and ancestral connection. Campos-Pons’s paintings and photographs counteract the “death-worlds” Nash describes—meaning the predominant view of Black maternity as one that is analogous to loss and death—by presenting specific sites from her ancestral histories, her heritage, and her personal maternity journey. Instead, her work evokes spaces of radical love and care. In this paper, I focus on two works of Campos-Pons’s— El Nacimiento de la Flor de Cardi (2006) and Umbilical Cord (1991)—which engage themes of motherhood, reproduction, and familial connection through the figural Black body. My analysis puts Campos-Pons’s work into dialogue with the writings of authors such as Katherine McKittrick and M. NourbeSe Philip to suggest ways in which her artistic practice reframes the maternal body as a lived reality rather than a symbolic construct. In so doing, I suggest that Campos-Pons’ multiple decades of practice constitute a form of artistic activism rooted in larger discourses of feminism, race, migration, and radical, revolutionary love.

“Few modern paintings can claim their origins in a library, writes scholar and artist Deborah Willis, but it was in the public library that Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration of the Negro series initially took shape. To produce the Migration series, Lawrence conducted research using materials in the Arthur Schomburg Collection, installed on the third floor of the 135th Street Harlem branch of the New York Public Library (1904-05) designed by the prominent firm of McKim, Mead & White. The series visually recounts the phenomenon of the Great Migration, the mass exodus of over 6 million African Americans from the South to the northern and western regions of the United States beginning around 1910 and continuing through the 1970s. Both rural and urban landscapes were fundamentally transformed by Black migrants’ movements and the communities they formed, altering cultural, political, economic, and social life in the United States. Segregated neighborhoods in cities from San Francisco to Chicago and New York to Boston that migrants and long-time residents were forced to inhabit were reshaped into spaces of what historian Earl Lewis calls “congregation.” These spaces were structured but not wholly defined by the forces of segregation and thus produce an ambivalence about the city and its landscapes. In this paper, I argue that Lawrence gives this ambivalence a visual form in the Migration series. Through his synthesis of content and modernist form and use of repetition and montage, I propose the series enables viewers to reflect on how Black migrants have shaped countless urban and rural landscapes across the United States. I examine how the changing urban landscape of Harlem and the spatial context of the public library within this landscape contributed to the development of the Migration series. By looking at the Migration series within “the migrant’s time” what landscape stories emerge?

In 1849, Henry “Box” Brown emancipated himself from slavery by climbing into a cargo crate, where he spent twenty-seven hours being shipped from Virginia to Pennsylvania. After his delivery upon “free” soil, Brown spoke of his enslavement and escape at antislavery conventions, eventually leveraging his prominence to produce Mirror of Slavery, a semi-autobiographical moving panorama. During performances, Brown took theaters on a proto-cinematic journey, narrating a simplified history of slavery in the U.S. as a long canvas of painted backdrops advanced behind him, culminating in an imagined future of universal emancipation.

Although this canvas is lost, textual descriptions reveal that Mirror of Slavery presented a sequence of scenes copied from popular media, using familiar depictions of patriotic landscapes as settings. For one scene, Brown stood before an image of a stately garden in Virginia, recognizable as George Washington’s gravesite in Mount Vernon. My paper examines antebellum representations of this famous destination primarily in relation to Brown, whose experience as a known fugitive destabilizes the image’s appeal. In Mirror of Slavery, Mount Vernon is no longer a patriotic idyll but a memorial to violence and conquest. This framework offers new insight into the connection between white supremacy and nineteenth-century environmental cultivation, surfacing how American landscape practices helped naturalize colonial occupation. I trace how the antebellum national landscape was shaped and represented to enforce Black disenfranchisement, drawing on Black Geographies scholarship to understand Mirror of Slavery as a counter-narrative and invitation to consider to the emancipatory potential of resisting cultivated patriotism.