Center and Periphery?: Mapping a Future for Research in Netherlandish Art
In recent years, academic scholarship on Netherlandish art has increasingly embraced decolonial and intersectional approaches to the study of visual culture. Meanwhile, museums continue to mount exhibitions and sponsor technical research focused around well-known artists such as Pieter Bruegel, Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer. Easel painting remains the crowd-pleasing focal point of most large-scale art exhibitions even as new research illuminates alternative media ranging from glass engraving to textiles. Efforts to reinscribe those previously excluded from the ‘canon’, such as women artists, offer promise but must reckon with the problematics of canonicity itself. This session seeks papers that model a productive synthesis or dialogue between these trends, mapping pathways for future inquiry that reconcile divergent goals and prepare today’s emerging scholars for careers both within and beyond academe. Papers might situate works by familiar artists in unfamiliar terrain, for instance by examining them in relation to global trade, material culture, or through an intersectional lens. Others may offer critiques of the ‘center and periphery’ dichotomy by foregrounding historically marginalized topics and makers against the background of canonical art production. Analyses of innovative museum projects (recent and future) are also welcome, as is a frank assessment of the continuing value of connoisseurship as practice and methodology. Proposals from early-stage scholars are especially welcome.
Please submit a 250-word abstract and 2-page abbreviated CV to Stephanie Dickey (stephanie.dickey@queensu.ca) and Suzanne van de Meerendonk (s.vandemeerendonk@queensu.ca) by September 1, 2023, for consideration. Contributors must be members in good standing of HNA and CAA.