AGNES presents:
The Isabel and Alfred Bader Lecture in European Art with Dr Stephanie Porras
In-person and online, Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts
15 November 2024
6–7:30 pm, with reception to follow
Sign up for the reminder email for livestream
ASL interpretation and automated live captions will be available.
Presented in partnership with the Isabel Bader Centre for Performing Arts. With support from the Bader Legacy Fund.
The Dutch in the Americas
Lecture by Dr Stephanie Porras
With footholds in North America, the Caribbean, South America, and along the west coast of Africa, the Dutch played a vital, yet understudied role in the early modern Americas. Via the West India Company’s transatlantic traffic in raw materials (beaver pelts, pearls, sugar, gold), refined artistic products, and people (both willing settlers and enslaved laborers), the Dutch not only extracted desirable goods and materials, but imported and contributed to varied visual and material cultures of mapping and navigation, enslavement, plantation economies, architecture and city planning across North and South America, from what is now New York to North East Brazil. The ‘Dutch’ in the Americas were not a uniform population but included French Huguenots, Swedes, Sephardic Jews, allied Indigenous groups and enslaved Africans. Outlining how the Dutch colonial project in the Americas both diverged and overlapped with their competitors, this talk considers the central role these ‘Dutch’ artists, artworks and material goods played in the Americas, presenting an alternate view of the colonial Americas.
Biography
Stephanie Porras is Professor of Art History and Chair of the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University in New Orleans. She specializes in the visual and material cultures of Northern Europe, the Spanish world and the Dutch Atlantic, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. She is outgoing Reviews Editor for the Art Bulletin and serves on the editorial board of the Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art/Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek. Her latest book, The First Viral Images: Maerten de Vos, Antwerp print and the early modern globe was published in 2023 (Pennsylvania State University press). She is also the author of Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination (Pennsylvania State University press, 2016) and The Art of the Northern Renaissance: Courts, Commerce, Devotion (Laurence King, 2018).
Agnes Etherington Art Centre
Situated within territories of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre is a curatorially-driven and research-intensive professional art centre that proudly serves a dual mandate as a leading, internationally recognized public art gallery and as an active pedagogical resource at Queen’s University in Kingston. By commissioning, researching, collecting and stewarding works of art, and by exhibiting and interpreting visual culture through an intersectional lens, Agnes creates opportunities for participation and exchange across communities, cultures, histories and geographies.
Agnes is committed to anti-racism. We work to eradicate institutional biases and develop accountable programs that centre the artistic expression and lived experience of Black, Indigenous and People of Colour. Agnes promotes 2SLGBTQIAP+ positive spaces.
207 Stuart Street (Temporary home while we wait for Agnes Reimagined)
Kingston, ON K7L 2V9
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Images:
1. Albert Eckhout, Still Life with Watermelon, Pineapple, and other Fruits (detail), c. 1640, oil on canvas. Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen. Photo: John Lee
2. Dr Stephanie Porras. Courtesy of Dr Porras.