Launching from Print
Jennifer L. Roberts, X.D. and Nancy Yang Professor of Arts and Sciences, Drew Gilpin Faust Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University
Association of Print Scholars Tenth Annual Distinguished Scholar Lecture

Jennifer L. Roberts will deliver a talk that examines how the study of print and printmaking can open unexpected lines of inquiry across disciplines—from circuit design to space studies. Drawing on recent and forthcoming projects, and reviewing questions raised in Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Roberts will outline avenues of research for future scholars.

Roberts is an art historian and professor at Harvard University whose scholarship focuses on the interface between the arts and the natural sciences, the history and theory of craft and materiality, and the history of print. In her scholarship and curating, Roberts was the co-founder of Harvard’s Minding Making Project (now on hiatus), which hosted a series of workshops exploring artisanal knowledge. In 2012, she curated the exhibition Jasper Johns/In Press: The Crosshatch Works and the Logic of Print at the Harvard Art Museums. She is the author of Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History (2004), Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (2014), and Contact: Art and the Pull of Print (2024, based on her Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in 2021). Her forthcoming co-authored publication with the artist Dario Robleto, The Heartbeat at the Edge of the Solar System: Science, Emotion, and the Golden Record (2026), will examine the cultural and cosmic implications of the EEG and EKG signatures on the Voyager Golden Record, in relation to the history of graphic inscriptions from the interior of the body.

This event is organized by the Association of Print Scholars (APS) and hosted on Zoom by The Drawing Foundation. 

Photo: Jennifer L. Roberts