Academies of Art in Europe and the Americas, 1600–1900 is the fifth installment in the Seminar Papers series. In collaboration with the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich, the present volume began as a three-part meeting. An international group of 19 scholars came together to examine academies of art and arts organizations as a means to help us better understand their complexities in terms of functions, ideologies, and differing contexts. The 17 essays resulting from these meetings explore a broad range of art academies across time and space. In addition to the seminars’ contributors, we solicited contributions from Sonia Gomes Pereira and Tomáš Valeš in order to broaden the volume’s intellectual scope.

A new book series, Art & invites artists and thinkers to interrogate together how artistic practices, both past and present, shape our relationships to specific issues. Each volume will approach one such topic: histories, water, abilities, dreaming, and others to come. Offering multiple points of entry through varied formats—first-person narrative, artwork, scholarly essay, conversation—the series engages with different cultural contexts and time periods to actively embrace art’s multiple histories.

Volume 2 engages human and nonhuman relations to water as well as how the ebbs and flows of this material’s varied embodiments intersect with migratory histories, both past and present.