May 13, 2021

Topic: Life Stories: Art and the Stages of Life

Speaker: Erin J. Campbell, Professor of Early Modern European Art, Department of Art History and Visual Studies, University of Victoria

A recorded free live webinar held on Thursday, May 13th, 2021 from 10:00 to 11:00 am Pacific Time (recording below).

Art shapes our life stories, life passages, and significant family rituals. The talk will provide a virtual curator’s tour of the exhibition Life Stories, recently at the Legacy Art Gallery (Dec. 2, 2020-April 10, 2021), featuring a short film of the exhibition and the website that offers 360 views of the gallery installation and individual images of the wide range of artworks and objects included in the exhibition. I will also share some of the poignant stories written by visitors about the objects that are important to their own life stories. From paintings and photographs, to textiles, ceramics and furniture, including a 17^th c. Jacobean bed as part of an art installation by artist Elly Heise, Life Stories provides an opportunity to think about the objects that are important to our own life stories.

Professor Campbell’s research focuses on the Early Modern domestic interior. Her publications appear in journals and essay collections, including the Journal of Art Historiography, Sixteenth Century Journal, Word & Image, Renaissance Quarterly, The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain, To Have and To Hold: Marriage in Premodern Europe 1200–1700, Design and Agency: Critical Perspectives on Identities, Histories, Practices, and RACAR. Most recently, she is co-editor and contributing author of The Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior: People, Objects, Domesticities (Ashgate, 2013), co-editor of A Cultural History of Furniture, v. II, The Middle Ages and Renaissance, 500-1500 (forthcoming), and author of Old Women and Art in the Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior (Ashgate, 2015). Her current SSHRC-supported project is “Art and the Stages of Life in the Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior.”