Exhibitions Crafting Visual Culture

Exhibitions are catalysts of relationships: the invisible relationships between artists, institutions, and their socio-cultural context, through which exhibitions constructed cultural narratives, circulated artistic value, and contributed to the formation of national artistic ideals. Bárbara Romero Ferrón focuses on the study of art exhibitions from a computational approach, specifically using network analysis and complex systems theory. She shows how exhibitions operate as interconnected arenas rather than isolated events that happen over time. This guides readers through a detailed case study of nineteenth-century Spanish art, revealing how exhibitions actively shaped ideas of what Spanish art was.

Bárbara Romero Ferrón, born in 1993, is a research associate at the Provenance Lab at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg and an affiliate researcher at iArtHis Lab at the University of Málaga. She holds a BA and an MA in Art History from the University of Málaga and earned her PhD at the CulturePlex Lab at Western University (Canada). Her work focuses on the study of provenance, exhibition histories, and cultural circulation through computational and data-driven approaches, with particular emphasis on complex systems theory and network analysis.