March 24, 2025, at 1:00 PM Eastern (12:00 PM Central – 11:00 AM Mountain – 10:00 AM Pacific)
Registration is not required.
Use attached ZOOM MEETING: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84940879011?pwd=ub8r1JeonpvGFAIr3uaENuarm2Xs6L.1
Meeting ID: 849 4087 9011
Passcode: 651239
The Print Council of America invites you to join a special online presentation, “Reflecting on Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Slave Trade,” on March 24, 2025, at 1:00 PM Eastern (12:00 PM Central – 11:00 AM Mountain – 10:00 AM Pacific). A panel of four art historians will discuss their recently published book, Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Atlantic Slave Trace: Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2024. Expanding on a major public program of April 2021, this volume presents wide-ranging perspectives on the legacies of the Dutch Atlantic slave trade within and beyond museum walls. Contributions by curators, academics, activists, artists, and poets consider this history as reflected in the arts of Europe, the Americas, Africa, and the Black diaspora more broadly, together illuminating how art museums may function as liberatory spaces working against systemic injustice.
Panelists: Rachel Burke is a doctoral candidate in the department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Her dissertation explores the intersections of whiteness, natural landscapes, and antebellum American identity formation staged in Henry “Box” Brown’s moving panorama, “Mirror of Slavery.” After collaborating with Sarah, Joanna, and Kéla, she applied themes from the project under discussion today to Land as Archive, an exhibition co-curated at Dumbarton Oaks that examines legacies of slavery and institutional history. Rachel’s scholarship has also been supported by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Omohundro Institute, among other organizations.
Sarah W. Mallory is the Annette and Oscar de la Renta Assistant Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Morgan Library and Museum, where she is curating a forthcoming exhibition on Rembrandt’setchings. She is a specialist in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art, with a particular interest in works on paper, and environmental and colonial histories. Her dissertation, which she is completing at Harvard University, looks to landscape images to construct a visual history of wetlands in early modern Northern Europe. In 2021, she co-organized the international conference “Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Slave Trade: Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures,” and co-edited the ensuing volume (Brill, 2025), which is supported by the Kress Foundation. Mallory’s work has appeared in Master Drawings, and the edited volumes Dutch Golden Age(s): The Shaping of a Cultural Community (Brepols, 2021) and Art and Geography in Europe 1550-1815. Contesting the Geo-Artistic Impact of the School of Art (Amsterdam University Press, 2024).
Kéla Jackson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Working at the intersection of art history, visual culture, and Black studies, her dissertation focuses on ruptural aesthetics—collage, constructed photography, and quilting—in contemporary visions of Black girlhood. Her writing has been published in Boston Art Review, Panorama Journal of American Art, as well as various exhibition catalogs including The Sculpture of William Edmondson: Tombstones, Garden Ornaments, and Stonework. Kéla received her undergraduate degree from Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. Her work has been generously supported by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Terra Foundation for American Art, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Joanna Sheers Seidenstein is Assistant Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Met, where she is responsible for Northern European drawings and prints from the Renaissance to the end of the 19th century. Before coming to The Met in 2022, she held the Stanley H. Durwood Curatorial Fellowship at the Harvard Art Museums, in which role she collaborated with Sarah, Kéla, and Rachel on the public program related to the publication under discussion today, and co-curated, with Susan Anderson, the exhibition Crossroads: Drawing the Dutch Landscape. Her other exhibitions include Divine Encounter: Rembrandt’s Abraham and the Angels, presented at The Frick Collection in 2017, and Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, co-curated with Alison Hokanson and currently on view at The Met. Joanna holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts of NYU.
Moderator: Walter S. Melion, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History, Emory University