Acknowledgments

Dackerman, Susan

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Acknowledgments

Susan Dackerman (Editor)

Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

Acknowledgments

Author

Susan Dackerman (Editor)

PublisherHarvard Art Museums

Related print edition pages: pp.15-16

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00097.005

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-16359

Acknowledgments

Susan Dackerman
Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints, Harvard Art Museums

University museums provide the unique opportunity to work on projects with a wide range of individuals and collections across campuses. Accordingly, the curators, faculty, students, and museum staffs of Harvard and Northwestern universities have been integral to the conception and execution of this project. First, I would like to thank my colleagues at the Harvard Art Museums who have shown true grit in their willingness to undertake this project during the closure and renovation of the museum building on Quincy Street. Though their efforts were complicated by the move of the collection and staff to an offsite location, everyone performed their part with aplomb. I would like to thank in particular Emily Hankle, the extraordinary curatorial assistant for the exhibition; Penley Knipe and Anne Driesse, the museums’ paper conservators, who unwearyingly helped prepare works from the Fogg and other Harvard collections; Francine Flynn, our registrar, who ably handled all the loan arrangements; Katie Andresen, Marsha Pomerantz, Becky Hunt, Julie Swiderski, and David Sturtevant, who ensured the successful production of the catalogue; Karen Gausch, who oversaw the installation; Peter Schilling, who fabricated remarkable facsimiles of the printed instruments for use in the galleries; David Cole and Sonja Plesset, grant-writing geniuses who helped secure an NEH grant; Kelsey McNiff, who engineered connections between the exhibition and Harvard faculty and their classes; Corinne Zimmerman and Ray Williams, who organized the programming; Jennifer Novak, who oversaw the creation of the website; Katya Kallsen, who photographed works from the Art Museums’ and other collections; my always-encouraging curatorial colleagues, Debi Kao, Susanne Ebbinghaus, and Stephan Wolohojian; and Tom Lentz, who supported this exhibition project from its inception.

When I arrived at Harvard in 2005, I had expected to find collections that would make an exhibition on sixteenth-century art and science possible, but I didn’t quite expect the bounty I discovered at the Harvard Art Museums, Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Houghton Library, Countway Library of Medicine, Botany Libraries, Map Collection, and Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. At each, I have found knowledgeable and supportive colleagues such as Sara Schechner, Hope Mayo, Jack Eckert, Judith A. Warnement, Joseph Garver, and Constance Rinaldo, who helped me navigate and interpret the collections; and at the Weissman Preservation Center, conservators Theresa Smith and Debora Mayer, who conducted technical analysis that provided useful insights into particular artworks.

I am also grateful to have such remarkable academic colleagues. Since the fall of 2006, the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard has sponsored a monthly interdisciplinary seminar, Prints and the Production of Knowledge, which has been attended by a loyal following of faculty, graduate students, and museum professionals. Specialists in fields related to the themes of the exhibition presented papers in the seminar, and writers for the catalogue were culled from this group, resulting in a polyphonic collection of disciplinary and generational voices. Catalogue essayists Lorraine Daston, Katharine Park, Suzanne Karr Schmidt, and Claudia Swan have composed astute and informative texts, and I’m thankful for their efforts. All of the catalogue entries were written by interns and graduate students (some now curators and professors), many of whom also presented their research to the group. This collegial exchange fostered discerning and unexpected correlations among contributions. For the opportunity and benefits of this intellectual forum, I am indebted to Homi Bhabha, director of the Mahindra Humanities Center, which graciously hosted and subsidized the group over the years, and to my seminar co-chair Katharine Park, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard, who suggested establishing the group.

From our first conversation about the exhibition, Katy Park has been an eager and inspiring partner in the project—as collaborator on the humanities center seminar, co-instructor of a spring 2010 graduate seminar on the themes of the exhibition, and a contributor to the catalogue. I am grateful for her support and steadfast participation. The faculty, students, and curator of Harvard’s History of Science department and Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments have openly shared their expertise through the exhibition’s and catalogue’s preparation. Sara Schechner, the David P. Wheatland Curator of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, has been particularly generous with her expertise and time, sharing her extensive knowledge with me, Katy, and the students involved in the project.

After five years of preparation, the greatest gratification has come from working with an enthusiastic and committed band of graduate students and museum interns. I would like to thank in particular Suzanne Karr Schmidt, who served as an intern in the print department in 2006–7, during the formative stages of the exhibition’s development. Her knowledge of “prints with movable parts” has made some of the most innovative aspects of this exhibition possible. Her successor in the position, Dániel Margócsy, also made significant intellectual and organizational contributions to the project. His interest in the history of zoological representations is the reason there are so many pictures of animals in the show. Other students served shorter terms but also made considerable contributions: Jasper van Putten, Marisa Mandabach, and Daniel Zolli, in particular. I am grateful to all the student scholars who wrote for the catalogue, and to my faculty colleague Joseph Koerner for encouraging their participation. Deep joy comes from the knowledge that a few dissertation proposals have emerged from research undertaken for the exhibition and catalogue.

Jennifer Snodgrass has been of invaluable assistance in shaping and editing this volume. Working with multiple authors is never easy and her persistence has been commendable. Conny Purtill of the Purtill Family Business designed the catalogue, understanding its intentions from the start and admirably working them into the body of the book. I am also grateful for the elegant installation designed by Karen Nielsen, who resolved complicated spatial issues and transformed the galleries into a space perfectly suited to the display of Renaissance art, books, and instruments. Special thanks also are due to the outside reader of the catalogue manuscript for his learned and insightful advice and commentary.

Only through major loans from European and American collections is such a comprehensive display achievable. My museum colleagues have liberally approved requests, and I would like to thank the following individuals for their compliance and assistance throughout the preparations for this exhibition. At the Adler Planetarium: Devon Pyle-Vowles; Albertina: Maria Luise Sternath-Schuppanz, Margarete Heck, and Sonja Eiböck; British Museum: Antony Griffiths, Mark McDonald, and Giulia Bartrum; Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg: Yasmin Doosry; Koninklijk Oudheidkundig Genootschap: Hester Manger Cats-van den Berg; Kunstmuseum Basel: Christian Müller; Library of Congress: John Hessler and Daniel De Simone; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: David Becker and Stephanie Stepanek; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC: Andrew Robison and Peter Parshall; New York Academy of Medicine: Anne Hilliam, Miriam Mandelbaum, and Arlene Shaner; Philadelphia Museum of Art: Shelley Langdale; Rijksmuseum: Huigen Leeflang; Blaffer Foundation: James Clifton; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich: Achim Riether; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin: Michael Roth; and Yale Center for British Art: Elisabeth Fairman and Theresa Fairbanks-Harris. Loans have also come from a number of private collectors to whom I wish to express my gratitude: Tycho Bray Bergquist; Owen Gingerich (who has also been a valued adviser on astronomical matters); Georg von Welser and the Freiherrlich von Welserschen Familienstiftung, Neunhof; and a collector who wishes to remain anonymous.

Such a momentous undertaking is not possible without the support of generous funders. I began research for the project during an idyllic fellowship spent at the Clark Art Institute, and also began writing the catalogue under their auspices during a summer junket in Antibes. The Clark’s director and former assistant director, Michael Ann Holly and Mark Ledbury, are consummately gracious intellectual hosts. My research also benefited from a Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship, which allowed me to travel to European collections, and a Samuel H. Kress Foundation Old Masters in Context grant, which funded a colloquium in the formative stages of the planning process. Summers at the Acadia Summer Arts Program, fondly known as Kippy Kamp, have provided a forum to present research on the show to museum colleagues and artists. Hearty thanks are due to the National Endowment of the Humanities, which provided significant funding for the implementation of the exhibition and its programs. We should all be grateful to them for continuing to support ambitious, interdisciplinary humanities projects during this period of economic turmoil. Former Harvard University Provost Steven Hyman also has generously directed funds to underwrite the exhibition. Longtime friends of the Fogg also supported the project in their typical bighearted and openhanded way: every museum should be so lucky as to have patrons as giving and dedicated as Mrs. Arthur K. Solomon, Julian and Hope Edison, Lionel and Vivian Spiro, Walter and Virgilia Klein, Barbara and the late Robert Wheaton, and a donor who wishes to remain anonymous. Without the munificence of such funders, exhibitions such as this one would not be possible.

On a more personal note, I am ever grateful to Marjorie B. Cohn, who in 1992 gave me a chance to try my hand at curatorial work as an intern in the Fogg’s print department, and in 2005 gave me the chance to be Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints at Harvard and curator of this exhibition. I have been lucky my whole life to have the unfailing support of my parents, Gerry and Rose Dackerman. And finally, I would like to thank Helen Molesworth, who fills my life with pleasure. You all make the pursuit of knowledge possible.

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