Saturday, november 4, 2023 | 11am - 12pm (CST)

On-site Lecture

Free with Admission | Registration recommended

The Minnesota Marine Art Museum, Oberton Education Room 

Register for the lecture

Join the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s Chief Curator Naomi Slipp, as she discusses the museum’s current exhibition, Re/Framing the View: Nineteenth-Century American Landscapes. Naomi will discuss how women of the nineteenth-century were faced with limited opportunities presented during their lifetimes, but how some carved out successful careers as professional artists painting landscapes and still lifes. During this time period, most women were either trained by a male family member, supported by their husband, or engaged in amateur art making as a local practice. Others may not have considered themselves fine artists, but worked as artisans in professional settings, decorating china, glass, and other objects. Many practiced needle arts and domestic handicrafts, decorating their own homes with stitched outdoor scenery or floral motifs, giving designs as gifts, or selling pieces to consumers. Most of them also balanced the demands of motherhood, caregiving, or domestic labor.  In this hour-long talk, explore how these women found productive avenues to express their appreciation for the American scene and engage in creative expression. Female artists cultivated the widespread taste for American scenery in fine art and popular culture, and, as creators and consumers, it was women who brought the American landscape into the American home, naturalizing it for everyone.

About Naomi Slipp

Naomi Slipp is the Douglas and Cynthia Crocker Endowed Chair for the Chief Curator and Director of Museum Learning at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts.  Her research explores the intersections between art and science in the nineteenth century, and she has published essays in Panorama, Sculpture Journal, British Art Studies, and the collections Victorian Science and Imagery (2021), Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth Century Art and Visual Culture (2019), and Bodies beyond Borders (2017), among other venues. She holds a PhD from Boston University and MA from University of Chicago, and was previously a tenured Associate Professor of Art History at Auburn University in Montgomery, Alabama.