Metamorphic Print and the Untouchable Arts in Nineteenth-Century America

Join us in celebrating the opening of Serious Fun an exhibition curated by Curator of Graphic Arts and Director, Visual Culture Program Erika Piola with “Metamorphic Print and the Untouchable Arts in Nineteenth-Century America,” a lecture by Dr. Juliet Sperling.

Metamorphic Print and the Untouchable Arts in Nineteenth-Century America
Nineteenth-century audiences largely kept a polite distance from high-status works of painting and sculpture. And yet these ostensibly untouchable arts were often made and understood with tactile sensibilities in mind. This talk focuses on the vital role of prints as a medium in shaping and disseminating these pervasive, culturally trained ideas about touch’s role in perception. It highlights a selection of metamorphic prints, or paper constructions with folded, layered, and expandable features that proliferated in U.S. print culture between roughly 1780 and 1910. Closely examining how these objects guided users from applied interaction toward more abstract concepts of tactility reveals the print medium’s power both to model sophisticated visualities and transport them across media, fundamentally shaping encounters with artworks beyond reach.

Juliet Sperling is Assistant Professor of Art History and Kollar Endowed Chair in American Art in the School of Art + Art History + Design at the University of Washington. Her research and teaching focus on the art and material culture of North America from the colonial period through the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on print history and theory. She is the author of Tactile Sensibilities: Seeing Through Print in American Art, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in Spring 2027.