NORDIC ART HISTORY ROUNDTABLES: WOMEN & ENVIRONMENT IN NORDIC ART & DESIGN

Expanding upon the conversations had in “New Stories in Nordic Art History”, in this second roundtable we will hear more about museum acquisitions, curation, research, and pedagogy in North American and British institutions as it pertains to Nordic art history. Our speakers will introduce their work into reviving women’s stories and art practices as well as ongoing conversations around environment within Nordic art and design, both as a subject and as a created space.

Chair:

MaryAnne Stevens, Independent art historian and curator

MaryAnne Stevens specialises in 18th-, 19th- and early 20th- century art, with particular reference to British, French and Nordic art in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Following a full-time career in the academic world, she worked at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, where, as Director of Academic Affairs, she established the Learning Department and the Architecture Programme, professionalised the Collections, Library and Archive, and, for three years from 2005 - 2007, served as Acting Secretary. She left the Royal Academy in January 2013 to pursue a career as an independent art historian, curator, lecturer and consultant. She has curated many major international loan exhibitions, the most recent being Nikolai Astrup: Visions of Norway (Clark Art Institute MA, Bergen and Stockholm, 2021 - 22) and After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art (National Gallery London, 2023).

Speakers:

Isabelle Gapp, University of Aberdeen

Isabelle Gapp is an art historian who writes and teaches at the intersections of landscape painting, environmental history, and climate change around the Circumpolar North. She is an Interdisciplinary Fellow in the Department of Art History at the University of Aberdeen. Isabelle leads the British Academy-funded project From the Floe Edge and multi-grant awarded project Teaching Arctic Environments. She is the author of A Circumpolar Landscape: Art and Environment in Scandinavia and North America, 1890-1930 (Lund Humphries, 2024).

Charlotte Ashby, Birkbeck, University of London

Charlotte Ashby is a lecturer in art and design history at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Modernism in Scandinavia (2017) and Art Nouveau: Art, Architecture and Design in Transformation (2021), and she is co-editor of the anthologies Imagined Cosmopolis: Internationalism and Cultural Exchange at the fin-de-siecle (2019) and Building/Object: Shared and Contested Territories of Design and Architecture (2022).

Mary Morton, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Mary Morton is curator and head of the French paintings department at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. She received her bachelor's degree from Stanford University in history, and her PhD from Brown University, concentrating on 19th and early 20th century European painting. Dr. Morton began her curatorial career in the European art department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and then as associate curator of paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Her exhibition projects prior to arriving at the NGA include Courbet and the Modern Landscape (2006), Oudry's Painted Menagerie (2007), and The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme (2010). At the National Gallery, she organized the presentation of Gauguin: Maker of Myth (2011), a reinstallation of the Gallery's renowned nineteenth century collection (2012); Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter's Eye (2015), Cézanne Portraits (2017-18), Corot Women (2018) True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780-1870 (2020) and Paris 1874: the Impressionist Moment (2024). In 2018, the French government awarded her Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.

Image: Anna Boberg, Night at Store Molla, (n.d.), oil on canvas mounted on paperboard, 33 x 50, National Museum Stockholm.

Host or Publisher London Art Week