Nancy Karrels Receives Award
Held March 20–21, the 2021 virtual symposium was sponsored by the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art and the Dahesh Museum of Art. Karrels was given $1000, and symposium participant Christine Olsen also was named a prizewinner this year.
Karrels is completing her doctoral dissertation, “Visual Provenance: The Iconography of Cultural Conquest in France, 1796–1830.” In her presentation, “Documenting Plunder: The Dessins Denon as a Vision of Museum-Building in the Modern Era,” she proposed that the illustrated acts of art pillage contained in the Dessins Denon, a print recueil project pursued by Musée Napoléon director Dominique-Vivant Denon in the early 1800s, outlined a systematic methodology of national museum-building for France, while shrewdly attaching Denon’s feats to those of Napoléon and the Grande Armée for posterity.
Karrels curated the 2017 exhibition Provenance: A Forensic History of Art at Krannert Art Museum and has published articles and given papers internationally on the history of collecting. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Doctoral Award (France) and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada doctoral fellowship. She holds degrees in common law and civil law from McGill University.