How did artists and Antiquaries create visual records of objects and places before the invention of photography? How did they ensure the visual preservation of fragile heritage? The next display at the Society of Antiquaries will showcase how monuments, archaeological finds, and faraway places were immortalised through sketching and printing.

By bringing together drawings, printing plates, woodblocks, and their impressions, along with some of the original objects, the display will allow visitors to trace the creative process behind engraved images. Through six themes, the display will not only exemplify the breadth of the Society’s collections but also reveal the collaborative work of antiquaries and artists. This display is a celebration of the enduring legacy of those early visual records and their crucial role in preserving in ink the memory of disappearing heritage, much like today’s digitisation campaigns.

Please note: This display is available to be seen by Fellows and Affiliate Members during our regular Library opening hours (Monday to Friday, 10am-5pm) and by members of the public who are coming to the building as part of an event which they have booked for.

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum of the Smithsonian Institution seeks to contract 1 number of individuals to provide Collections Assistant, Drawings, Prints & Graphic Design services.

The Request for Quote and Statement of Work, which contain the details regarding this contract opportunities are available upon request until November 3, 2025. Requests to obtain these documents will not be accepted after that date.

Bids are due by 5pm EST, November 10, 2025.

All correspondence regarding this request should include the subject line “Collections Assistant, DPGD”.

Please submit your request for the RFQ, SOW, and any questions to:
Jamie Kwan
Assistant Curator, Drawings, Prints & Graphic Design
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
HRcuratorDPGD@si.edu

LA Print Edition 14: Rauschenberg in L.A. — a panel conversation celebrating Robert Rauschenberg’s groundbreaking print work at Gemini G.E.L. and his deep ties to Los Angeles -- will take place on October 11 at 5:30 p.m. at LACMA. Hosted by Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings, Erin Maynes, the panel will include artist Fiona Connor, Rauschenberg scholar Helen Hsu, and master printer Jennifer Turner.

Before the panel, join us for an Open House and viewing of "Robert Rauschenberg at Gemini G.E.L.: Celebrating Four Decades of Innovation and Collaboration" at Gemini G.E.L. from 12-4pm.

More info about Gemini's Rauschenberg exhibition here: https://www.geminigel.com/exhibitions/

Oct 17, 2025 - 10am–5pm
Hybrid: School of Art and Design, Room 312, or via Zoom, with overflow seating in Auditorium (KAM 62)

This symposium will explore artistic production, practices, and the agency of printed media before 1750 as they intersect with themes of sexuality and gender.

Register here for the Zoom link: https://illinois.zoom.us/meeting/register/KCdQF1CASaCVwKg0dAwpKw#/registration

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.

The event 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 talks will be projected for viewing together at the museum, from 10 am–4 pm, with a tour of the exhibition* to follow.

This symposium is being held in conjunction with Imagination, Faith, and Desire: Art and Agency in European Prints, 1475–1800, curated by Maureen Warren, and on view at Krannert Art Museum from Sep 25, 2025–Feb 26, 2026.

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

Envisioning Gender and Sexuality in Premodern European Prints
Friday, October 17, 2025
10:00 am – 5:00 pm CDT (USA)

Note about Time Zones: Timings are given for the U.S.A. Central Daylight Time (CDT).
The start time for speaker presentations in different time zones are as follows:
USA Pacific Daylight Time (UTC -7) 8:30 am
USA Eastern Daylight Time (UTC -4) 11:30 am
UK (UTC +1) 4:30 pm
Europe (UTC +2) 5:30 pm


Morning Presentations – 10:30 am – 12 pm
• Jolene Zigarovich, Ph.D., University of Northern Iowa
“ ‘To be seen a most surprising Hermaphrodite’: The Visual Circulation of Intersex Lives and Bodies”

• Darja (Daria) Kocerova, Ph.D. Candidate, The Warburg Institution, London
“Once again about The Images of “Henetaster” and Adultery in Early Modern Europe” (Virtual)

• Sunmin Cha, Ph.D. Candidate, Columbia University, New York
“Subverting Eden: Hans Baldung Grien’s Queer Reimagining of Adam and Eve” (Virtual)

Afternoon Presentations – 1:00–2:30 pm
• Saskia Beranek, Ph.D., Wonsook Kim College of Fine Arts, Illinois State University
“Bearing Fruit: Female Portraits and Collective Identity in Dutch Maps”

• Kendra Grimmett, Ph.D., Ball State University
“His Little Death: Danger, Intimacy, and Power in Barthel Beham’s Judith Seated on the Body of Holofernes”

• Tatiana C. String, Ph.D., The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“The Fine Line between Pleasure and Pain: Homoerotic Performance in Bartel Beham’s Battle for the Banner”

Keynote Address – 2:30–3:30 pm
• Nicole Cook, Ph.D., Museum of Fine Art, Boston
“Nightwalking and Nightwatching: Navigating Gender at Night in Early Modern Dutch Works on Paper”

Join us for a two-day program exploring the early twentieth-century revival of relief printmaking. Events include a keynote by artist Christiane Baumgartner at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College (Nov. 13), in conjunction with the exhibition "An Unruly Assembly: The Culley Collection of Woodblock Prints," followed by a study day at LACMA (Nov. 14), featuring the exhibition "Deep Cuts: Block Printing Across Cultures."

Co-organized by the Benton Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Symposium: Stradanus at Cooper Hewitt

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 The Stradanus Project webpage:
https://www.cooperhewitt.org/the-stradanus-project

Cooper Hewitt’s Stradanus Project is made possible with support from the Getty Foundation through The Paper Project initiative; and received Federal support from the Smithsonian Collections Care Initiative, administered by the National Collections Program. Additional support for the Stradanus at Cooper Hewitt symposium has been provided by the Tavolozza Foundation

This exhibition is a collaborative effort by five curators around the state of Kansas to raise awareness of the women artists who worked tirelessly to keep the visual arts alive during the decade of the Great Depression, while enlarging opportunities for women artists who came after.

Elizabeth Seaton of the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art at Kansas State University (Manhattan, KS) presents the story of Sue Jean Covacevich (1905-1998) who spent the 1930s primarily in Mexico and was offered the chance to study with Diego Rivera (1886-1957), and brought her mural-making experience back to Winfield, Kansas. Kara Heitz, scholar of Kansas New Deal art at the Kansas City Art Institute, focuses on the Topeka printmaker Mary Huntoon (1896-1970) who was in charge of the WPA’s Federal Art Project for the state of Kansas. Bill North of the Clara Hatton Center (Lindsborg, KS), shows the breadth of study of all the arts –painting, printmaking, ceramics, weaving, metalsmithing, and bookbinding—that Clara Anna Hatton (1901-1991) undertook while teaching at the University of Kansas and then brought to Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, to build up the school’s art department. Mike Brotherton of Labette Community College (Parsons, KS) has studied all the New Deal program print series Margaret Whittemore (1897-1983) created to celebrate the landmarks and natural beauties of the state. Cori Sherman North of the Sandzén Gallery highlights the career of Anna E. Keener (1895-1982) who was an early student of Birger Sandzén (1871-1954) but developed a more experimental body of work with her New Mexico students, and the work of Norma Bassett Hall (181889-1957), charter member of the Prairie Print Makers society that was established in Sandzén’s home studio in December of 1930.

Helen Frankenthaler (American, 1928–2011) began printmaking in 1961, working across lithography, woodcut, and etching for the next fifty years. Frankenthaler is known for her abstract paintings and especially her signature “soak-stain” technique—allowing paint to sit, spread, and pool on untreated canvas. She brought this same sensibility, what she described as a “pouring, flooding, spilling, bleeding one,” to works on paper.

While printmaking is often characterized by precision and control, Frankenthaler’s prints allow for chance encounters between pigment and surface—unintentional effects that emphasize the agency and alchemy of materials. The exhibition focuses on her print practice and calls attention to the unpredictability, chance, and accident in Frankenthaler’s work.

The exhibition includes works by other artists in The Block’s collection who have similarly embraced chance, accident, or aesthetic surprise in their artworks. It brings together a sampling of lithographs, drawings, and watercolors by Frankenthaler’s friends and colleagues—Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, and Robert Motherwell—and many other artists from The Block’s permanent collection.

In 2023, The Block Museum was one of ten university museums to receive artwork as part of the Frankenthaler Print Initiative. The exhibition features this extraordinary gift and brings it into conversation with prints in the collection.

For millennia, wine has played a significant role not only in the human diet but also in cultural myths, rituals, and festivities. As a result, wine—its ingredients, making, drinking, and effects on the human body and mind—has been a constant muse for artistic creation. The exhibition In Vino Veritas (In Wine, Truth), a phrase coined by the Roman polymath Pliny the Elder, celebrates the presence and meaning of wine in prints, drawings, textiles, and objects made in Europe between 1450 and 1800. Drawn from the museum’s collection, more than 70 works by artists from throughout Europe explore wine’s myths, symbols, and stories. These images reveal how diverse cultures and religions ascribed meaning and transformational properties to the so-called nectar of the gods.

The University of Mary Washington and the American Historical Print Collectors Society present:
Lasting Legacy: A Celebration of American Historical Prints through the Career of Wendy Joan Shadwell (UMW '63)

Thursday, September 25, 5:00 p.m.

Hurley Convergence Center (HCC), Digital Auditorium (Rm. 136) on the campus of the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Reception with refreshments following.

Please join us for a conversation with Clayton Lewis and Allison Stagg about the important role of popular American historical prints in connection with the career and philanthropy of Wendy Shadwell, alumna of Mary Washington ('63), Curator of Prints Emerita at the New York Historical Society, and President of the American Historical Print Collectors Society (1998 - 2001).

Participants:

Clayton Lewis | President, American Historical Print Collectors Society and Curator Emeritus, William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan

Allison Stagg (’02, Art History) | Researcher and lecturer in the Department of Architecture and Art History at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, member AHPCS

Moderator: Julia DeLancey | Professor of Art History, Department of Cultural and Philosophical Inquiry, University of Mary Washington

Sponsored by Department of Cultural and Philosophical Inquiry, UMW Galleries, the Visiting Artists and Scholars Program (Department of Studio Art), and the Wendy J. Shadwell '63 Program Endowment in Art History in collaboration with the American Historical Print Collectors Society.

This event is free. Please register by email at : clayclem@umich.edu. Deadline for registration: September 15.

If you have any questions about this event, please contact Clayton Lewis (clayclem@umich.edu)

Also, please consider joining us for :

A tour of Belmont, American artist Gari Melchers’ Home and Studio
Thursday, September 25, 1:00 pm

Belmont is the spectacular home and studio of American Naturalist artist Julius Garibaldi (Gari) Melchers (1860-1932). This 27-acre estate features the historic home, art studio and galleries, tours, gardens, historic buildings and several miles of walking trails. Gari Melchers Home and Studio serves as a resource for studying the work of a major American artist and serves as an art center for the people of the Fredericksburg area.

We will meet at Belmont at 1:00 pm for a tour starting at 1:30. Admission is $10

Location: 224 Washington Street, Falmouth, VA 22405

Parking is available on site. Website: www.garimelchers.org

Please register by email at : clayclem@umich.edu. Deadline for registration: September 15.
Tour space is limited to 12 people