Short description:

This book examines collecting around the world and how women have participated in and formed collections globally.

Long description:

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.

Table of Contents:

Collecting to Collectingism: New Directions in Women's Transcultural Practices

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 Bexare?as 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