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“IMPRINTING RACE: ARTIST TALK & A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION ON THE MATERIALITY OF PRINT AND THE MAKING OF RACE” (VIRTUAL, 17-18 MARCH 2022)

Joseph Callender after Sydney Parkinson and Richard Bernard Godfrey, Plate 1 in Bickerstaff’s Boston almanack, for the year of our redemption 1774, 1773. Engraving, 6 7/8 x 8 3/4 in. Collection of American Antiquarian Society. Courtesy of American Antiquarian Society.

In 2020, the Association of Print Scholars was proud to award Jennifer Chuong and Kailani Polzak with the APS Collaboration Grant in support of their proposed program, Imprinting Race, a two-day interdisciplinary event that will include an artist’s lecture and roundtable discussion that will explore printmaking’s role in tangibly shaping and challenging ideas of racial difference during the long eighteenth century, at The Clark Art Institute.

Imprinting Race will examine the role of engraving and intaglio printmaking in visualizing and circulating material images of bodies during a period when, according to Chuong and Polzak, “theories of human variety were being concretized into racial categories.” On the first day, printmaker and publisher Curlee Raven Holton, will deliver the keynote address, discussing the relationship between ideas of race and the material qualities of print. On the second day, five emerging scholars will host a roundtable discussion about their scholarship on race and print. The event will conclude with a broader discussion of issues raised and on the relationship between art practice and scholarship.

To learn more about each event and how to register, see below.

We hope to see you there!

IMPRINTING RACE: ARTIST TALK BY CURLEE RAVEN HOLTON

THURSDAY, MARCH 17, 2022, 5:30 PM–6:30 PM (EST)

Master printmaker Curlee Raven Holton, who also serves as executive director of the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park, discusses his artistic practice, with an emphasis on the intersections of race and printmaking.

Presented live in the Clark’s auditorium. This program will also be livestreamed; advance registration online to receive the livestream link is required.

IMPRINTING RACE: A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION ON THE MATERIALITY OF PRINT AND THE MAKING OF RACE

FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 2022, 3:00 PM–4:00 PM (EST)

Participants: Horace Ballard (Harvard Art Museums), Layla Bermeo (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Jennifer Chuong (Harvard University), Jase Clark (Raven Fine Art Editions), Thadeus Dowad (University of California, Berkeley), Kailani Polzak (University of California, Santa Cruz), and Curlee Raven Holton (Lafayette College and Raven Fine Art Editions)

This roundtable explores the role of printmaking in tangibly shaping and challenging ideas of racial difference. Motivated by colonial encounters and the later, widespread institution of chattel slavery in the Atlantic world, early modern Europeans and their inheritors sought to materialize race to ground social hierarchy in physical, bodily difference. The participants of this conversation will consider two important strands of recent art-historical scholarship on materiality and the production of race, exploring the question: how have the constitution of matrix and print shaped different conceptions of surfaces and bodies?

Presented live in the Clark’s auditorium. This program will also be livestreamed; advance registration online to receive the livestream link is required.

Additional support provided by the Association of Print Scholars and The Rare Book School.