Society and Style: Prints from the Sheldon Museum of Art

This collection of works explores how Societies and Styles changed over the course of Early Modern Europe (1500-1800) from the time of the advent of printing on paper to the Industrial Revolution and beyond through little-seen printed masterpieces from the Sheldon Museum of Art’s collection. Today, “print” continues to endure even as new forms of digital publications transform our world in previously unimaginable ways, just as printing did centuries ago. This exhibition offers a view into the ways printed works of art on paper (mostly woodcuts, engravings, and etchings) showcase society and its various aspects, ranging from one Christian martyrdom of a saint to secular works focusing on fashion and death, portraits, and views of a sea serpent, Rome, and Monte Carlo. Half the prints feature William Hogarth’s satires of contemporary social practices surrounding election politics, beer drinking, and relations between the sexes. Although other notable artists designed prints here—Anthony Van Dyck, Hans Holbein the Younger, Giovanni Piranesi, and Alphonse Mucha—the exhibition’s organization was determined by the prints selected by the sixteen students in Prof. Alison Stewart’s “History of Prints: New Media of the Renaissance” class during fall 2013 in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Contributions from Rachel Moore, Lucy Windle, Anne Rimmington, Archana Verma, Ruben Mejia, Britiany Daugherty, Patrick Graybill, Eric Himmelberger, Christopher Dorwart, Kaylie Hogan-Schnittker, Kelly Wold, Amanda Mobley Guenther, Eder Jaramillo, Felicia Nehl, Paula Rotschafer, and Elizabeth Slonecker.