An illustration of Polyporus beatiei, from Mary Banning’s The Fungi of Maryland.
My object of the week is an image from Mary Banning’s The Fungi of Maryland, a lush volume with 175 hand-painted watercolors accompanied by extensive descriptions. Banning was a fascinating and highly productive mycologist, whose dedication to fungi – as opposed to flowers – marked her out amongst amateur botanists. A short history of Banning’s life and work can be found in Alicia Puglionesi’s article for Alta Obscura.
The Art and Industry in Early America: Rhode Island Furniture, 1650–1830 symposium, which examines Rhode Island-made furniture, its makers and its social contexts, and accompanies the exhibition of the same name, on display at Yale University Art Gallery from August 19, 2016 until January 8, 2017.
The CFP for the New Perspectives on Parisian Haute Couture (1850-present) conference.
James Clifford’s lectures on ‘Museum Realisms‘ at the Research Center for Material Culture, available online here.
The CFP for the Making Memory: Material and Visual Cultures of Commemoration in Ireland, c.1800-2016 conference. The conference develops ideas and expands the chronology of the earlier Making 1916: Material and Visual Culture of the Easter Rising conference, the proceedings from which were published by Liverpool University Press.
The online exhibition Artisans and Craft Production in Nineteenth-Century Scotland. Created as part of the University of Edinburgh’s Leverhulme-funded ‘Artisans and the Craft Economy in Scotland, 1780 to 1914’ project, the exhibition explores both the materiality of craft-making for those working in artisan trades, and the cultural landscape they and their work inhabited.
The CFP for the fascinating-sounding CAA panel, Modernism’s Craft Discourses. The session examines the ways in which modernists have historically understood their own work in painting, sculpture, photography, or collage as craft practices, asking ‘how have the discourses defining craft—notions of process, medium, labor, and reform—contributed to the development of modernist art and its criticism?’ These questions are particularly relevant to my postdoctoral project on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collage, or, what I’ve previously thought of as collage ‘before modernism’. I’m interested to see how the conversations deriving from this panel colour my perceptions of modernism’s relationship with craft, and how this in turn might inform my own reading of collage before 1912.
The CFP for the Collecting & Collectibles Area of the Popular Culture Association, 2017 conference.
Last week also saw the publication of Lord Stern’s review of the REF, the results of which have real implications for Early Career Researchers. See the report here. Matthew Shaw and Charlotte Mathieson have also compiled an initial bibliography of literature on the review, which provides a list of essential reading on the subject.
As ever, the blog Notches: remarks on the history of sexuality is an endless source of fascination. Claire Hayward’s post ‘Queer Terminology: LGBTQ Histories and the Semantics of Sexuality’, and Ania Ostrowska’s think-piece on the The Institute of Sexology exhibition held at The Wellcome Collection, are recent highlights amongst a wealth of fascinating articles and interviews.
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