Printmaking, Mobility, and Artistic Networks from the 15th century to the 20th

Presented by the Department of Drawings & Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This session, exploring topics in printmaking from the early modern period to the present, is organized annually by the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in association with the IFPDA. This year’s speakers explore themes of travel, itinerancy, transnationalism, and networking in talks that will take us to 15th-century Germany, the colonial Andes, and twentieth-century Mexico. Following the three presentations, Nadine Orenstein, Drue Heinz Curator in Charge of the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Met, will moderate a discussion and Q & A.

Presentations：

Wenzel von Olmutz in Germany: The Peregrinations of a Fifteenth-Century Printmaker — Femke Speelberg

Femke Speelberg is Curator of Historic Ornament, Design and Architecture in the Department of Drawings & Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Her work centers on the role of drawings, prints, and illustrated books in processes of artistic ideation, creation, and exchange. Covering works of art from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century, her exhibitions and publications are inherently interdisciplinary in scope and connect art objects with the worlds in which they were created and functioned. At The Met, she has curated the exhibitions Living in Style: Five Centuries of Interior Design from the Collection of Drawings and Prints (2013), Fashion and Virtue: Textile Patterns and the Print Revolution, 1520–1620 (2015), Chippendale: The Designs and Legacy of a Furniture Maker (2018), and the forthcoming Gothic by Design: The Dawn of Architectural Draftsmanship (April 13–July 19, 2026).

Virgins of the Andes: Shifting Scales of Devotion in Colonial South American Print Culture – Emily C. Floyd

Emily C. Floyd is Associate Professor in Visual Culture and Art before 1700 at University College London, and Editor and Curator at the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion at Yale University (MAVCOR – mavcor.yale.edu). Her current book project, The Monster and the Saint: Race and the Body in the Art and Art History of the Colonial Andes, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and Thoma Foundation, focuses on sanctity and monstrosity in the colonial Andes as a way of accessing early modern understandings of race in the region. She is the author of The Mobile Image: Prints and the Shaping of Devotional Networks from Lima to the Andes and Beyond (University of Texas Press, 2025) and has written on prints and printmaking in the colonial Andes, the digital humanities, and race and the visual in colonial South America.

Prints Across Borders: Black Artists and Transnational Journeys — Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins, PhD

Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins, PhD, is an art historian, curator, and writer whose work highlights African American artists and transnational exchange. She curated In the Spirit of Resistance: American Modernists and the Mexican Muralist School (1996), tracing how Black artists studied with Mexican muralists and printmakers. Her publications include San Francisco Lithographer: African American Artist, Grafton Tyler Brown (Print Quarterly) and Sargent Johnson: African American Modernist (SFMOMA), based on her dissertation on Johnson, a sculptor, printmaker, and painter. She has also contributed to printmaking projects along the Pacific Rim, including exhibitions in Hawaii and Christchurch. She is the author of Seasons at Lakeside Dairy (2024) and new literary projects on transnational artists.

Q & A moderated by Nadine Orenstein, Drue Heinz Curator in Charge, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York