Building an Exhibition: Degas & the Laundress
13 September at 1500 (BST) // 1600 (CEST) // 1000 (EDT)
Online // Free
Join us for a special Network Session to learn about the landmark exhibition Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism taking place at the Cleveland Museum of Art between 8th September 2023 and 14th January 2024. The exhibition brings together dozens of Edgar Degas’s representations of laundresses, a subject that he undertook in a variety of media throughout his career. In addition to works pictorializing the labor of laundresses by Degas and his contemporaries, the exhibition will feature ephemera contextualizing the public image and reputation of this working-class symbol throughout the late nineteenth century.
We will be joined by two members of the exhibition team: Britany Salsbury, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Cleveland Museum of Art; and Ivey Barker, Andrew W. Mellon Photograph Conservation Fellow at the Cleveland Museum of Art; as well as two catalogue contributors: Aleksandra Bursac, PhD Candidate, University of Toronto; and Jillian Kruse, PhD Candidate, Case Western Reserve University. We will hear about the show’s conception and organization, the collaborative research that made it possible, and the objects within. The event will be followed by a discussion and Q&A.
Our Speakers:
Britany Salsbury is curator of prints and drawings at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Her previous exhibitions and publications include Altered States: Etching in Late 19th-Century Paris (2016) and Nineteenth-Century French Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art (2023). Her research has been published in journals including Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide and Print Quarterly, and with Ruth E. Iskin, she co-edited the book Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera: Perspectives in a Global World (2019). Her doctoral dissertation on print portfolios in fin-de-siècle Paris, completed at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, was supported by the Getty Research Institute and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Ivey Barker is the Andrew W. Mellon Photograph Conservation Fellow at the Cleveland Museum of Art. She earned a Master of Arts in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management from the University of Rochester, in collaboration with the George Eastman Museum. Her graduate studies and research culminated in the disaster response thesis and workshop, “Water Emergency Response for Aqueous Inkjet Prints.” In addition to being a Fulbright alumna, she has recently held positions at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC and the Image Permanence Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY.
Aleksandra Bursac is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation explores how Degas used particular motifs to engage with media and materiality, and to negotiate larger social questions. Her essay in the catalogue for the upcoming exhibition Degas and the Laundress at the Cleveland Museum of Art draws on this work. She will be a curatorial intern in the department of paintings at the Getty Museum in 2023–2024.
Jillian Kruse is a PhD candidate in the joint Art History program at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century European works on paper with particular interests in ecocriticism, experimental printmaking, and the connections between artmaking, anarchism, and utopia in the prints of Camille Pissarro. She has held positions at the National Gallery of Ireland, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Jillian currently serves as a curatorial intern in Prints and Drawings at the Cleveland Museum of Art.