This virtual program is part of our Winter Speaker Series, and will be presented on Zoom. A Zoom link will be emailed to all SCHS members before the program. 

Discover the stories of long-overlooked American women who, at a time when women rarely worked outside the home, became commercial photographers and shaped the new, challenging medium. Professor Katherine Manthorne will fill in the gaps in photographic, American, and women’s history and discuss the parallels between the growth of photography and the late-19th-century women’s movement.

Katherine Manthorne is an art historian at the Graduate Center, City University of New York committed to the study of the art of the Americas (1800-1940) in its hemispheric dimensions. Landscape imagery is a special passion, embodied in publications from Tropical Renaissance. North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839-1879 (1989) and Traveler Artists: Landscapes of Latin America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (2015) to California Mexicana: Missions to Murals, 1820 to 1930 (2017) and The Rockies and the Alps: Bierstadt, Calame and the Romance of the Mountains (2017). The Caribbean figures in Fern Hunting Among These Picturesque Mountains. Frederic Edwin Church in Jamaica (2010); Nueva York (2010); and Caribbean Crossroads (2012). Working toward the internationalization of American art, she taught courses at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark; Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice, Italy; and the Freie Universität, Berlin; and co-organized transnational conferences including Landscape Art of the Americas: Sites of Human Intervention Across the Nineteenth Century at the Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia (2021). Women’s contributions to visual culture constitutes another theme in her work featured in two books: Women in the Dark: American Female Photographers 1850-1900 (2020) and Restless Enterprise: The Art and Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex (2020). Intermediality is another interest explored in Film and Modern American Art: The Dialogue Between Cinema and Painting (2019). She received fellowships from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Fulbright and Smithsonian Institution. Currently projects include Sweet Fortunes: Sugar Plantations, Art Collecting and Enslaved Labor; and Fidelia Bridges: Between Fine Art & Popular Culture.