Physically demanding and technically challenging, printmaking has often been considered the labor of men. As the current exhibition of prints by Diana Scultori shows, women were active in the medium as early as the sixteenth century. Looking closely at several of Diana’s engravings, this virtual talk casts a wide net to consider how early modern women got their start in the profession, their motivation for making prints, their choice of subject matter, and the special skills they brought to bear on the art.

This program is the annual Rose Susan Hirschhorn Behrend Lecture.

Things to know:

-There will be time for Q&A at the end of the program.​

-A link will be sent to registrants prior to the program from Public Programs no-reply@zoom.us.

-The program will be recorded. A link to the recording will be sent to everyone who registers for the program.

About the speaker:

Madeleine C. Viljoen, Curator of Prints and the Spencer Collection, is responsible for The New York Public Library’s wide-ranging collection of prints and illustrated books. She holds a PhD in art history from Princeton University, and her articles have appeared among others in Print Quarterly, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, Oxford Art Journal, and The Art Bulletin, as well as in catalogues and essay collections. In 2022, she co-curated the exhibition Fortune and Folly in 1720 about the first global financial collapse of 1720 and co-wrote the associated stand-alone volume Meltdown! Picturing the World’s First Bubble Economy (2020). At the Library, she has organized numerous exhibitions, including several centered on the subject of women in the graphic arts, including Daring Methods: The Prints of Mary Cassatt (2013) and Printing Women: Three Centuries of Female Printmakers (2016). Most recently, she contributed essays on early modern women printmakers to the exhibition catalogue Making her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400-1800 (Baltimore Museum of Art and the Art Gallery of Ontario, 2023-2024) and on women’s self-portrait prints for Female Printmakers, Printsellers and Publishers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women 1735 – 1830 (forthcoming 2024).

The program is closed captioned. Contact publicprograms@philamuseum.org regarding other accommodation requests.