12:00-1:00
This event is still happening! It is not taking place in the DAR Musuem building; instead it will be offered online. Please register here to get access to this lecture, which will be offered as a free webinar at the same day and time as the event was originally scheduled.
Colonial portraits can be dynamic historical evidence of people, places, and ideas. Yet most scholarship tends to overlook their social importance or focus on late-18th-century northern examples. Colonial Virginia Portraits is an interactive database that records information for more than 500 portraits created for Virginians between 1649 and 1776. Doing so, it illuminates an understudied region of artistic production and enables new research questions and methods. This presentation will discuss why and how this digital project came together, what it can reveal about colonial Virginia’s art and history, and why these portraits matter.
Speaker: Janine Yorimoto Boldt, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the American Philosophical Society Library & Museum and creator of Colonial Virginia Portraits