This book examines collecting around the world and how women have participated in and formed collections globally.
The edited volume builds on recent research and offers a wider lens through which to examine and challenge women’s collecting histories. Spanning from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first (although not organized chronologically) the research herein extends beyond European geographies and across time periods; it brings to light new research on how artificiallia and naturallia were collected, transported, exchanged, and/or displayed beyond Europe. Women, Collecting and Cultures Beyond Europe considers collections as points of contact that forged transcultural connections and knowledge exchange. Some authors focus mainly on collectors and what was collected, while others consider taxonomies, travel, patterns of consumption, migration, markets, and the after life of things. In its broad and interdisciplinary approach, this book amplifies women’s voices, and aims to position their collecting practices toward new transcultural directions, including women’s relation to distinct cultures, customs, and beliefs as well as exposing the challenges women faced when carving a place for themselves within global networks.
This study will be of interest to scholars working in collections and collecting, conservation, museum studies, art history, women’s studies, material and visual cultures, Indigenous studies, textile histories, global studies, history of science, social and cultural histories.
Arlene Leis
Part 1: Points of Transcultural Exchange
1. Européenerie in Feminine Space: Qing Imperial Women and Collecting in China’s Long Eighteenth Century
Chih-En Chen
2. Coerced Contact: The Dzungar Court Costume of a Swedish Knitting Instructor
Lisa Hellman
3. Trading Places: The Japanese Art Collection of O’Tama Kiyohara Ragusa
Maria Antonietta Spadaro
4. Created to Gleam: Decorum, Taste and Luxury of Four Dresses from Viceregal Mexico
Martha Sandoval-Villegas and Laura Garcia-Vedrenne
Part 2: Natural History, Colonial Encounters, and Indigenous Histories
5. The Botanist Was a Woman: Classifying and Collecting on the First French Circumnavigation of the Globe
Glynis Ridley
6. Pineapple Lady: Expertise and Exoticism in Agnes Block’s Self-Representation as Flora Batava
Catherine Powell-Warren
7. A Memsahib’s ‘Natural World’: Lady Mary Impey’s Collection of Indian Natural History Paintings
Apurba Chatterjee
8. Women and Huipils: The Treasuring of an Indigenous Garment in New Spain
Martha Sandoval-Villegas
9. Colonial Pantomime: Queen Marie I of Portugal’s Human Cabinet of Curiosities
Agnieszka Anna Ficek
Part 3: Settlers, Immigrants and New Frontiers
10. Settler Botanists, Nature’s Gentlemen, and the Canadian Book of Nature: Catharine Parr Traill’s Canadian Wild Flowers
Cynthia Sugars
11. Collecting Indian Art in Santa Fe: The Bryn Mawrters and the Politics of Preservation
Nancy Owen Lewis
12. The Spectacle of Sponsoring an Ottoman Trousseau
Gwendolyn Collaço
13. Las Bexareñas and their Wills: Women’s Material Culture and Cataloguing Practices in Spanish San Fernando de Béxar
Amy M. Porter
Part 4: Recovery, Collaboration, and Repatriation
14. 'He Surely Existed': Women of the Early Folk Art Collecting Movement and Thomas W. Commeraw, Forgotten African-American Potter
Brandt Zipp
15. Adjacency in the Collection
Toby Upson
16. Collecting Fibre Arts in Arnhem Land
Louise Hamby
17. From Women’s Hands: Learning from Métis Women’s Collections
Angela Fey and Maureen Matthews
Biography
Arlene Leis is an independent art historian who received her PhD from University of York.
