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 Cooper Hewitt’s Collections Highlights or the Smithsonian Collections website.
Submission guidelines:
Please submit a 150–200-word abstract, along with CV and affiliation, to stradanus_symposium@si.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 Getty through The Paper Project initiative; and received Federal support from the Smithsonian Collections Care Initiative, administered by the National Collections Program.