Advanced Study in the History of Art: Dutch Art in the World — in the Seventeenth Century and Now
This research-intensive graduate seminar will pair engagement with the most recent scholarship on seventeenth-century Dutch art in its economic, environmental, and global contexts with hands-on experience in curatorial practice, ranging from training in provenance research to exhibition development to writing for museum audiences.
A primary focus of the class will be our collective investigation of the MIT Museum's significant, but little-known holdings of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings and works on paper. Together we will conceptualize a framework for how best to present these works and our findings to a 21st-century audience. The format for our public-facing work will take the form of a digital and pop-up exhibition of selected artworks combined with a public workshop or a public study day.
The class will strike a balance between investigations of the MIT Museum’s collection at the museum’s offsite storage facility and discussions of recent interpretations of Dutch art: its visual theorizations of nature and artifice, the anxieties and pleasures of consumption in a capitalist economy, and the role of sight in ordering the world in an era of global commerce, enslavement, and colonial empire.
The seminar will meet periodically at the MFA Boston’s Center for Netherlandish Art (CNA) together with the seminar “A World Art: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art in Global and Material Perspectives” co-taught by Professor Michael Zell, Boston University, and Dr. Christopher Atkins, the CNA’s director, where we will have further opportunities for direct exchanges with curators and the close examination of works of art.
Because of our work in the MIT Museum’s offsite storage facility and visits to study rooms and conservation labs at the MFA Boston and the Harvard Art Museums, enrollment is strictly limited to 10.