58. Making Exhibitions: Institutions, Networks and Exhibition Practices in Europe, 1850–1914

During the second half of the nineteenth century, exhibitions became one of the principal means through which artworks, artistic knowledge, professional relationships and institutional practices circulated across national boundaries. Exhibition history has demonstrated that exhibitions can be studied as historically constructed events shaped by systems of selection, institutional structures, practices of display and the individuals involved in their organisation (Mainardi 1987; Greenberg, Ferguson & Nairne 1996; Altshuler 2008). Building on this scholarship, the session shifts attention from the finished exhibition towards the practical and collaborative processes through which exhibitions came into being.

Transnational history has drawn attention to connections, exchanges and processes extending across national frameworks (Iriye & Saunier 2009; Saunier 2013), while approaches to cultural mobility have emphasised the agents, routes and conditions that make movement possible (Greenblatt et al. 2010). Applied to exhibition history, these perspectives invite questions about how artworks, information and exhibition practices moved between individuals and institutions; who facilitated these movements; and how local institutional circumstances shaped them. Correspondence, institutional records, exhibition catalogues, provenance material and contemporary press provide particularly valuable evidence for reconstructing these processes.

This session welcomes papers investigating the making of exhibitions between approximately 1850 and 1914. We particularly encourage contributions based on archival research that examine correspondence, exhibition catalogues, museum and art-society records, collecting practices, institutional cooperation and the circulation of artworks across national and cultural boundaries. Papers may focus on individual exhibitions, organisers and intermediaries, curatorial and selection practices, institutional collaborations, or exhibition-making as a collaborative process.

By bringing together case studies from different geographical and institutional contexts, the session aims to explore how exhibitions functioned as spaces in which professional relationships, institutional networks and artistic knowledge were created and negotiated. Comparative discussion will consider both differences between local circumstances and the connections through which exhibition practices travelled, contributing to a broader understanding of exhibition-making in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Themes: Exhibition history, Cultural exchange, Museum history

Lead Convenor: Iliana Mejias-Ojajärvi, University of Helsinki, Finland

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.