Lectures on Tap - "Making Art History: The First Women Printing Textiles"

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🧠 Lecture: "Making Art History: The First Women Printing Textiles"

🎤 Speaker: Suzanne Karr Schmidt

Can’t afford Italian Renaissance lace? Print it. Prefer Mexican grasshopper lace? Stamp it. Join us for a fascinating evening exploring extraordinary premodern artworks on printed fabric, many created and sold by women printmakers and publishers who have largely slipped from art history.

Focusing on two savvy businesswomen—Magdalena de Passe in 17th-century Netherlands and Manuela Cerezo in 18th-century Mexico—this lecture zooms in on one spectacular surviving example from each. Discover Magdalena’s possibly illicit linen chalice cover with an engraved “lace” border and her side hustle selling sleeping caps decorated with political portraits. Then travel to Mexico City to encounter Manuela’s oversize satin thesis poster, bordered with woodblock-stamped winged grasshoppers and accented with shimmering gold embroidery.

Based on groundbreaking new research, this talk reveals how these hybrid objects were made, used, and why so few survive.

Suzanne Karr Schmidt is Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at Chicago’s Newberry Library and director of the Movable Book Society. Her work centers on interactive printing and the materiality of ink on silk, linen, and cotton.

Get a drink, connect, and learn at Lectures on Tap! 🙌