Envisioning Gender and Sexuality in Premodern European Prints
Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, October 17, 2025
Abstract deadline April 1, 2025

Held in conjunction with the exhibition, Imagination, Faith, and Desire:
Agency in European Printmaking, 1475-1800

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

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on themes of gender and sexuality on themes including, but not limited to:
- women and gender nonconforming artists, patrons, collectors, and viewers
- representations of unconventional gender identities
- printed media and same-sex desire
- fashion and the sartorial politics of gender
- case studies on printed media through feminist, queer, nonbinary, and trans lenses

The symposium 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 walkthrough 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.

To submit, please send an abstract of no more than 250 words along with a 2-page CV (including contact info, any institutional affiliation, and your preference to present in-person or virtually) to Sandra Racek (sandraracek2014@u.northwestern.edu) and Maureen Warren, Curator of European and American art, Krannert Art Museum (maureen@illinois.edu) by April,1, 2025.