November 6-7, 2025
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
New York
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum will be hosting the symposium “Stradanus at Cooper Hewitt” as the culmination of its multi-year Stradanus Project on November 6-7, 2025.
The museum is home to 143 sheets of drawings and inscriptions by the Netherlandish artist Johannes Stradanus (1523-1605), also known as Jan van der Straet. 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.
In 2021-2022, Cooper Hewitt conducted a conservation survey of all of its Stradanus sketches. Based on this information, the team selected 39 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.
Over two days, 14 curators, scholars, and conservators will present new research on Stradanus. In addition to these presentations, there will be viewings of Cooper Hewitt’s Stradanus holdings in the Drue Heinz Study Center for Drawings and Prints.
To register for the symposium, and explore the full schedule of presentations and abstracts, please visit https://www.cooperhewitt.org/t