This panel brings together distinct perspectives on recent or upcoming projects considering French and Belgian drawing and drawing materials. Participants will reflect on how and where such projects originate, and how the different players involved collaborate and complement each other’s work on and with the objects themselves. Each speaker gives a brief presentation of their project, each of which offers a major intervention into some aspect of the field of French or Belgian drawings. These presentations are followed by a lively conversation.
Panelists:
Shana Cooperstein, Assistant Professor of Art History, IE University, Spain
Laurel Garber, Park Family Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings and the Philadelphia Art Museum
Harriet Stratis, Paper Conservator and Scholar
Moderator:
Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, Associate Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
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Panelist Bios:
Shana Cooperstein is Assistant Professor of Art History, IE University, Spain, where she has taught sine 2023. A specialist of art of the long 19th century, Cooperstein has a particular interest in the material practices of artistic production, representational theory, and the history of scientific imaging. Her book Drawing Pedagogy in Modern France: Habit’s Demise (Routledge, 2025) examines schematization, the education of the eye, and other problems central to the history of art instruction in the modern era.
Laurel Garber is the Park Family Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings and the Philadelphia Art Museum. Her recent exhibition projects in Philadelphia include Wanda Gág: Art for Life’s Sake, Mary Cassatt at Work, and Emma Amos: Color Odyssey. She received her PhD from Northwestern University and previously held curatorial fellowships and roles at the Art Institute of Chicago,  J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Clark Art Institute. She is working on the exhibition Léon Spilliaert: Lit from Within that will open at The Menil Collection in 2027 and at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2028.
Harriet Stratis is a paper conservator and scholar with special expertise in the study and treatment of pastels. She served as Conservator of Prints and Drawings and Head of Paper Conservation at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1995 to 2013. She then assumed the role of Senior Research Conservator before retiring in 2017 and establishing her private consulting practice, Stratis Fine Art Conservation LLC. Stratis has published and presented talks on the materials and techniques employed by numerous artists, including Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, and James McNeill Whistler. She has a BA in Art History and Visual Arts from Barnard College, Columbia University, and an MA in Art History and a Certificate in Conservation from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
Moderator bio:
Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen is a specialist in nineteenth-century European art, and Associate Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts. She is the author of Modern Art & the Remaking of Human Disposition (University of Chicago Press, 2021), a study of gesture and body language in turn-of-the-century modern art.
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This DRAWINGS WEEK 2026 event was organized by The Drawing Foundation in partnership with the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University and in association with Master Drawings New York 2026.
          
      
Image: Nineteenth-century drawing materials including chalks and charcoals. Private Collection.
