Colonial Dutch “She-Merchants” as Collectors
March 21 at 12:15 pm
Zoom

The women of New Netherland and their New York descendants who had the right to buy, sell, and trade any kind of goods of their own accord. Women who took advantage of this freedom were even referred to as “she-merchants.” Louisa Wood Ruby (BGC visiting fellow) presents on the collecting habits of Dutch seventeenth-century she-merchants using inventories along with extant documents and letters, illuminating the lives of these women.

This symposium features speakers from New York City museums who will discuss how their institution responded to the pandemic, how it shaped and redefined their work, and the new pathways and connections it created for the future of their institutions. Organized by BGC’s director of digital humanities and exhibitions Jesse Merandy, featuring Sofie Andersen (Metropolitan Museum of Art), Rachel Eve Ginsberg and Jessica Walthew (Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum), Leslie Hayes (New-York Historical Society), Jamie Lawyer (Rubin Museum of Art).

Next Week:

How Can a Gathering of Things Be Transformed into a Scientific Collection?
March 28 at 12:15 pm
Zoom

Lisa Regazzoni (BGC spring visiting fellow) will give insight into their experimentation with objects from the study of Reinhart Koselleck, to transform these objects into a scientific collection with epistemic value. Regazzoni uses the guiding questions; How can new meanings be attributed to these objects, beyond their auratic value, which some might suspect of being the product of a personality cult? What answers can these objects provide to specific research questions? What is the role of material witnesses and, more generally, of the sensorial in accessing the past?

Heavenly Pearls: Nature, Religion, and Politics in Habsburg Spain
March 29 at 6 pm
Zoom / 38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall

Mónica Domínguez Torres (University of Delaware) explores the connotations and functions that pearls acquired in Spain under Habsburg rule, using the image of Our Lady of the Sagrario that was placed at Toledo Cathedral in 1616. The Virgin is splendidly covered with various pearl-studded garments, including a cloak embroidered with 78,000 natural pearls, coinciding with the “pearl rush” that occurred in the Caribbean and Pacific coasts of Cental America throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth century.