Now in its 22nd year, the 2016 Mary Stevens Reckford Memorial Lecture in European Studies is titled Appropriating Asia: The Depiction of the Exotic in European Art. The Institute for the Arts and Humanities will host the event Thursday, Feb. 25 at 7:30 in Hyde Hall. The lecture is free and open to the public.
In her talk, Stephanie Schrader, PhD, will use four artworks in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, to survey the appropriation of Asian culture by European artists from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Complex networks of trade and religion that brought knowledge of China and Korea to Europe will be examined to provide a better understanding of how Asian luxury goods functioned and circulated in early modern Europe. Schrader is curator in the Drawings Department at the Getty Museum.
She received her BA from Occidental College in Art History and her Masters Degree from Oberlin College in Art History before coming to the J. Paul Getty Museum as a graduate intern in the Drawings Department in 1993. In 1996 Stephanie entered the PhD program at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she began her dissertation on the sixteenth-century Netherlandish artist Jan Gossaert and his work for the Burgundian court. After teaching at UCSB and conducting research on her dissertation in Belgium and the Netherlands, Schrader returned to the Getty in 2001 as Assistant Curator. She has worked on scores of exhibitions at the Getty. Most notably, The Sacred Spaces of Pieter Saenredam, Telling the Difference: Rembrandt and his Pupils, Drawing Life: The Dutch Visual Tradition, and The Poetry of Paper. She finished her dissertation in 2006 and wrote two essays for the catalogue of the monographic exhibition on Gossaert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2010. Schrader investigated botanical painting and depictions of insect metamorphosis with the international loan exhibition Maria Sibylla Merian and Daughters: Women of Art and Science in 2008. In 2013 she curated an exhibition on the Getty’s drawing by Peter Paul Rubens of a man in Korean costume, examining the intersection of East and West in Antwerp. Now Curator of Drawings at the Getty Museum, Stephanie is preparing an exhibition about Rembrandt’s twenty-five drawn copies after Mughal paintings in the global city of Amsterdam.
For more on the Reckford lecture’s history, visit us here.