Pappas Lecture on Embroidered Landscapes
by Andrea Pappas
Andrea Pappas gave a paper, "Ecology of Vision: Eighteenth-Century Needlework, Globally-Sourced Artifacts, and Representational Systems,” at the Fifth Biennial Symposium of the Association of Historians of American Art last week. Her paper, drawn from a chapter of her book project, examined eighteenth-century American women's embroidered landscapes. She discussed the way that women interwove visual representational schemas drawn from Chinese ceramics, European chinoiserie, English embroidery, and Indian textiles to create sophisticated viewing experiences that belie the usual categorization of women's needlework pictures as "schoolgirl art." The conference was held in the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Weisman Museum of Art in Minneapolis.