This panel seeks to investigate the racialized dimensions of print and printmaking. The medium has played a central role in the ideological founding of “race” and its hierarchies through visual representation. However, print’s materials, processes, and the language we use to describe them interface with conceptions of race in ways that require further study. For example, the term “stereotype” originated in the printing trade but has since evolved to mean an oversimplified general idea, often with pejorative racial connotations; the invention of chromolithography in the nineteenth century offered a more nuanced way of representing skin tones but simultaneously enabled the increased circulation of racist imagery; the rabid appreciation and collection of Japanese prints in the West altered artistic production globally while idealizing Eastern cultures; anthropological sketches and watercolor studies of native peoples were routinely translated to print, widely reproduced, and used as tools of imperialism and colonialism. Contemporary artists have responded to these historical issues: for instance, Glenn Ligon used the trope of a fugitive slave ad in his Runaways series (1993). Inviting papers related to these and other case studies, this session will consider how print and its study has implicitly upheld, revised, or challenged social constructions of race (including whiteness). This panel is geographically and chronologically open and will put mass images, fine prints, and bibliography from all periods in conversation to understand the medium’s material relationship to race on a global, transhistorical scale.

A formal request for papers will follow with details on how to apply and the deadline for submissions.

Panel Organizer

Christina Michelon is a Luce /ACLS Fellow in American Art and a PhD Candidate in Art History at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities where she is completing her dissertation “Interior Impressions: Printed Material in the Nineteenth-Century American Home.” Her work has been supported by the Smithsonian Institution, the Winterthur Museum & Library, the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Chipstone Foundation.