Spanning almost 400 years, this display of prints and drawings explores some of the ways artists have responded to political violence and social injustice. Drawn from collections at the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the display surveys different forms of witnessing: works by artists who had direct experience of horrors, or who grew up in the shadow of terrible events; those who were commissioned to give visual form to the words of others, and those who assimilate in their work the trauma of distant ordeals.

The display asks us to think about how violence can be understood or appreciated through art. These artists bear witness to the collectivity of violence, but their works are also about looking. Each tries to draw us in to contemplate their challenging image, sometimes with the intention to shock, but always with the intention to mesmerize. What does it mean to witness violence even at a remove, even years after the events depicted?

The display showcases a recent acquisition of 20 prints by contemporary artist, Marcelle Hanselaar, and is juxtaposed alongside other historic, modern, and contemporary prints and drawings from the permanent collection and loans from the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, including works by the Chapman Brothers, Goya, Jane Joseph, Manet, Picasso, and Judy Watson.

Bearing Witness? contains images of trauma, violence, and death.

In November, Ben Dunham's collection of phototype (collotype) “re-proofs” by Emil Jacobi went to their new home in the Graphic Arts Department at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Jacobi once ran the printing facility of Philadelphia photographer Frederick Gutekunst. Jacobi came to Ben’s attention because his reproductions of J. Alphege Brewer’s 1914 etchings of Rheims Cathedral and copies by other printers became the “go-to” art for Americans who supported the Allies or had a family member serving in WWI. Visit Ben’s website devoted to Brewer’s life and work at www.jalphegebrewer.info/
jacobi-re-proofs. With luck and persistence, his extensive collection of Brewer etchings will find a similarly caring repository.

The University of Delaware Press published the book Money and Materiality in the Golden Age of Graphic Satire (2022), by Amanda Lahikainen, as part of the series Studies in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture.

Muñecas de Cartón is a six-year survey of the artists' collective Ni Santas' collaborative artistic practice drawing from their founding in 2016 to 2022. Inspired by the feminist artist Rotmi Enciso, Ni Santas is an autonomous all Women of Color collective whose mission is to create socially conscious visual narratives and promote sisterhood through skill sharing.

Muñecas de Cartón presents the intentional, yet spontaneous, joint effort between women artists to create, be heard, and be seen. The title is derived from the collective's extensive use of cardboard as their medium and the ephemeral context in which the work was created–– site and event specific. The exhibition features installations, prints, flyers, photos, and protest signs made by the different members throughout its six years, demonstrating the collective's bluntness, activist ideology, and passion for elevating women's voices.

Born in Tiflis [Tbilisi], Georgia in 1894, while the area was part of the Russian Empire, poet Ilia Zdanevich (“Iliazd”), seems to have felt little identification with the region. If he spoke Georgian (his mother’s native tongue), he gave no indication of this in his writings. After 1912, he moved into Russian avant-garde circles in Moscow and St. Petersburg. But he also “discovered” the self-taught Georgian painter, Nikos Pirosmani. He was passionate about ancient Armenian and Georgian church architecture. He loved the mountains of the Caucasus region. However, he did not express any affiliation as a “Georgian” or mention the politics of the region in his work, only noting that after the Revolution in October 1917 he was prevented from returning to Russia. His early experimental plays, composed between 1916-20, identify Tiflis as their publication site. But he never mentions the interlude from May 1918 through February 1921, when Georgia was briefly an independent republic before being annexed by the Soviet Union, or the name change of his birthplace to Tbilisi in 1936. Iliazd travelled to Paris in 1921 and spent the rest of his life there as a publisher and poet. Linked to international art circles, Iliazd’s career raises interesting questions about the combination of local culture(s) (Georgian, Russian, Parisian) and national identity politics in the modern avant-garde.

Speaker: Johanna Drucker is Distinguished Professor and Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, art, and digital humanities. Recent work includes Inventing the Alphabet (University of Chicago, 2022), Visualisation L’Interprétation modélisante (B42, 2020), and Iliazd: Meta-Biography of a Modernist (Johns Hopkins University Press 2020). Her artist’s books are widely represented in museum and library collections. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014. In 2021 she received the AIGA’s Steven Heller Award for Cultural Criticism.

The first of seven events in the series:

From Tallinn to Tbilisi: Art Across Boundaries in the Age of Empire

Through the long nineteenth century until the eventual collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, artists in territories under imperial control, such as Poland, Finland, Ukraine, the Baltics, the Caucasus, Central Asia and others, increasingly began to explore questions of national identity in response to hegemonic and Russo-centric narratives advanced by the tsarist regime. In this seminar series, speakers examine art production in key centres of activity beyond St Petersburg and Moscow to present perspectives from across the Empire. Exploring a range of topics, such as art education, travel, national revivals, and women's advancement, they consider the ways in which artists negotiated ethnic and territorial identities, advanced their professional careers, and recalibrated their art-making in response to imperial rule.

Mondays, 5-6:30pm (UK) / 6-7:30pm (CET) / 12-1:30pm (EST)
Teams, Free
Recording available after each event