Impressionism found expression in a wide variety of media, from porcelain to prints, furniture to fans. Yet to date, painting has been considered the primary and paradigmatic artform of the movement; the Impressionists’ work in other disciplines has often been side-lined or treated as subsidiary. New research is challenging these media hierarchies and critically reframing Impressionism as a phenomenon which crossed, connected, and even transcended a wealth of media.

Key Impressionist ideas, such as finish and ephemerality, were distinctively expressed in, and between, various media and techniques. As “painters of modern life”, the Impressionists responded to a world inundated with new and proliferating visual media, and did so not only as “painters”, but also as printmakers, ceramicists, sculptors, photographers, draughtsmen and -women, and much more. The multimedia and intermedial experiments of the Impressionists expanded the horizons of the movement in ways that are not yet fully appreciated.

Join Laurel Garber and Brittany Luberda for an online conversation about Impressionist intermediality, chaired by Samuel Raybone, and an introduction to their current research & forthcoming projects at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Baltimore Museum of Art, respectively.

Biographies

Brittany Luberda (she/her) is the Anne Stone Associate Curator of Decorative Arts at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where she curates a collection of 8,000 objects and furniture from Europe and America. Her recent exhibitions and major installations include Free/Will: Making Art in Early Maryland (2024), Recasting Colonialism: Michelle Erickson Ceramics (2023), Baltimore, Addressed: Baker Artists Awards (2022), and She Knew Where She Was Going: Gee's Bend Quilts and Civil Rights (2021). Luberda previously held roles at the Saint Louis Art Museum, The Frick Collection, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. She holds an MA in art history from Southern Methodist University and a BA in art history from the University of Chicago. In addition to curatorial work, Brittany serves on the Board of the American Ceramic Circle, has taught at Maryville University and Lindenwood University, and has published widely on decorative arts, curation, global trade, and colonialism, most recently in Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe 1400-1800 (2023).

Laurel Garber is the Park Family Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she works with the collection of modern and contemporary works on paper. Most recently at the PMA Laurel co-organized the exhibition Mary Cassatt at Work and in 2021 she worked on the Philadelphia presentation of Emma Amos: Color Odyssey. Laurel received her BA from Cornell University, MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and PhD from Northwestern University. Her doctoral dissertation, The Social Life of Etching in Nineteenth-Century France, examines the politics of the Etching Revival in Paris and the rise of the modern monotype. She’s held curatorial fellowships and positions in works on paper at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Clark Art Institute.

Samuel Raybone is Lecturer in Art History at Aberystwyth University.