Lunder Institute @ Yale Center for British Art: Trade, Movement, and Empire

How did the movement of commodities (and the people who cultivated, transported, taxed, and consumed them) create new traditions, dependencies, and inequalities? Rather than treating American independence as a self-contained national event, this session situates it within global networks of trade, labor, and extraction, to think through the networks that both enabled revolutionary protest and reproduced new inequalities. Lunder Institute @ 2026 Now in its third year, the Lunder Institute is expands the initiative to include programs in the United States and abroad, sponsoring work at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut; Tate Britain and the Royal Academy of Arts in London; and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. Lunder Institute @ 2026 invites audiences into a conversation about the broader geopolitical connections and legacies that marked the development of American art history, including its cultural production, representation, and historical memory.