This symposium will explore artistic production, practices, and the agency of printed media before 1750 as they intersect with themes of sexuality and gender.
Conceptions of sexuality and gender underwent profound changes in Europe during the premodern era (roughly 1300–1750) and were an important avenue of exploration for printmakers. In art prints, broadsheets, fashion plates, and anatomies alike, human subjects were fashioned and viewed in conversation with cultural attitudes and beliefs about gender and sexuality. Canonical works such as Albrecht Dürer’s Adam and Eve and Henrick Goltzius’s Farnese Hercules as Seen from Behind not only convey notions of artistic excellence but also their ideas about idealized bodies, gender roles, and sexuality. Additionally, gender and sexuality had profound effects on artistic practices and training. In a time when many women were precluded from traditional apprenticeships and professional guilds, printmaking could present alternative paths to collaboration and network building. Moreover, as an artform linked with the broad circulation of knowledge but also with intimate, private viewing, prints open doors to consider how artists and beholders conceived of their own experiences of gender and sexuality in and outside of social norms.
This symposium focused on sexuality and gender, held in conjunction with Imagination, Faith, and Desire: Art and Agency in European Prints, 1475–1800, will be hybrid, blending in-person presentations with online presentations via Zoom to make the event more equitable and permit international participation and will also include a walk-through of the exhibition.
The keynote speaker will be Nicole Cook, Senior Program Manager at the Center for Netherlandish Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Dr. Cook will share her research about seventeenth-century Dutch prints of “nightwalkers” and how they envisage a space for gender nonconformity.
