University of Helsinki
The keynote speaker at RAHNC2023 is professor Patricia Berman, Wellesley College, US. She is an expert on Scandinavian art with a special interest in national identity formation, issues of gender and sexuality, and in the problems of public space. Her books include studies of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, Belgian artist James Ensor, and of Danish painting in the nineteenth century.
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Canons Within, Canons Without
The exhibition history of Nordic art in North America is a case study in canonization involving regional collaboration and competition, national self-representation, overlapping curatorial missions, diplomacy, and the external shaping of an uncomfortable transnationalism. The talk revisits the organization of the 1982 exhibition “Northern Light” (Washington, DC; Brooklyn; Minneapolis; and Göteborg), the horizon of expectations initiated by the 1912 multi-city exhibition of Scandinavian art, the European reception of the “Northern Light” paradigm, and the persistence of that paradigm. The complex politics of inclusion, the ways in which the internal nationalisms of the Nordic countries intersected with views from without, and differing registers of art-historical chronology and definition shaped a North American canon of Nordic Art in which the period of the 1880s and ‘90s grew as a metonym for larger national and regional histories. The talk considers how inclusions, exclusions, blind spots, and differing local political conditions shaped and reshaped 20th-century trans-Atlantic exchange, as well as ongoing echoes of that phenomenon.
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The keynote speech will be followed by a panel with short “micro-histories” and a roudtable presenting the research initiative “Firing the Norwegian Canon”, organized by the University of Oslo and the National Museum (Oslo). The panel is convened by Patricia Berman who leads the project.