Chair:
MaryAnne Stevens, Independent art historian and curator
MaryAnne Stevens specialises in 18th-, 19th- and early 20th- century art, with particular reference to British, French and Nordic art in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Following a full-time career in the academic world, she worked at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, where, as Director of Academic Affairs, she established the Learning Department and the Architecture Programme, professionalised the Collections, Library and Archive, and, for three years from 2005 - 2007, served as Acting Secretary. She left the Royal Academy in January 2013 to pursue a career as an independent art historian, curator, lecturer and consultant. She has curated many major international loan exhibitions, the most recent being Nikolai Astrup: Visions of Norway (Clark Art Institute MA, Bergen and Stockholm, 2021 - 22) and After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art (National Gallery London, 2023).
Speakers:
Isabelle Gapp, University of Aberdeen
Isabelle Gapp is an art historian who writes and teaches at the intersections of landscape painting, environmental history, and climate change around the Circumpolar North. She is an Interdisciplinary Fellow in the Department of Art History at the University of Aberdeen. Isabelle leads the British Academy-funded project From the Floe Edge and multi-grant awarded project Teaching Arctic Environments. She is the author of A Circumpolar Landscape: Art and Environment in Scandinavia and North America, 1890-1930 (Lund Humphries, 2024).
Charlotte Ashby, Birkbeck, University of London
Charlotte Ashby is a lecturer in art and design history at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Modernism in Scandinavia (2017) and Art Nouveau: Art, Architecture and Design in Transformation (2021), and she is co-editor of the anthologies Imagined Cosmopolis: Internationalism and Cultural Exchange at the fin-de-siecle (2019) and Building/Object: Shared and Contested Territories of Design and Architecture (2022).
Leslie Anderson is Chief Curator of the National Nordic Museum. Recently, she led collaborations with the Ateneum Art Museum/National Gallery of Finland and Sweden’s Nationalmuseum; organized and co-curated the traveling exhibition Nordic Utopia? African Americans in the 20th Century; and commissioned the spatial sound and scent sculpture FLÓÐ by Jónsi (vocalist for the world-famous band Sigur Rós) for his first art exhibition at an American museum. Previously, Leslie held positions at Utah Museum of Fine Arts and Indianapolis Museum of Art and taught courses at Brooklyn College and Parsons School of Design. She has been an American Scandinavian-Foundation Fellow and a Fulbright grantee at the University of Copenhagen. For her curatorial work, she received the Association of Art Museum Curators Award for Excellence in 2018, the Utah Museums Association Award for Excellence in 2020, and University of Florida’s “40 Gators under 40” honor in 2023. She is a mayoral-appointed Seattle Arts Commissioner, chair of the City’s Public Art Advisory Committee, and a member of the Executive Council of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study.
