Dr. Aaron M. Hyman’s prolific scholarship explores northern European art and the art of the Spanish Empire, with a focus on the long seventeenth century. His interests include paradigms of artistic authorship and collaboration, the transmission and circulation of objects, and early modern print culture. While his primary aim is to situate works of art within the conditions of their making and viewing, he is equally interested in the historiographic conditions that have either limited art historical understanding or excluded objects from the historical record.

An Assistant Professor of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University, he received his PhD in art history from the University of California, Berkeley and his MA from Yale University. His first book, Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America (2021) exemplifies art history’s recent global reorientation, focusing on the transmission of northern European prints to the Spanish Americas and the different ways colonial artists engaged these materials. The book’s transatlantic frame reassesses how works of art exist in relationship across geographic distances and cultural divides and rethinks key terms of early modern authorship. It received numerous awards from the Latin American Studies Association, Association of Latin American Art, and the Renaissance Society of America.

Dr. Hyman’s keynote address is connected to his current research, which is his next book entitled Formalities: The Visual Potential of Script in Art of the Early Modern Spanish World. This project examines the unusual quantity of written words on works of art created between ca. 1540-1700 across the transatlantic Spanish Empire. This phenomenon of writing on/in works of art is one of the most distinctive features of production in the early modern Spanish World, but it has received little scholarly attention. Focusing instead on the visual and material dimensions of letterforms and their mobilization in art of the Spanish world of the long seventeenth century reveals artists drawing upon scripts to craft carefully coded pictorial performances of the written word that capitalized on imperial subjects’ acute awareness of the visual signification of writing and the resonance of scripts with specific types of documents, objects, and social registers. It looks at letters, archival documents, handwriting manuals, printed books, etc. as objects whose visual forms were fundamental to everyday life in the Spanish Empire and were routinely taken up by artists. This work has been supported by grants from the ACLS, the Thoma Foundation, and the Newberry Library.

Dr. Hyman has held fellowships from the Jacob K. Javits Foundation, the Tinker Foundation, the UC-MEXUS Institute, the Belgian American Educational Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was also a Mellon Fellow in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School (University of Virginia) and a founding member of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. More recent awards include a Wyeth Foundation for American Art, a publication fellowship from the Historians of Netherlandish Art, an Association of Print Scholars Publication Grant, the Association for Latin American Art Best Article Prize, and the College Art Association’s Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize.

We are delighted and honored to have Dr. Hyman give us a sneak-peek into his exciting recent research as our keynote speaker for the 2023 SUNY New Paltz Undergraduate Art History Symposium!