BALTIMORE, MD.- The Baltimore Museum of Art recently announced that Dr. Lara Yeager-Crasselt has been named Curator of European Painting and Sculpture and Department Head. Yeager-Crasselt is a scholar and curator of early modern European art, specializing in painting, sculpture, and tapestry produced in Northern Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. As part of her new role, she will oversee the reconceptualization of the BMA’s galleries of 15th- through 19th-century European art, with a particular emphasis on expanding the narratives told through the museum’s expansive holdings. The BMA has also promoted Dr. Leslie Cozzi to Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs in recognition of her numerous contributions to the museum since she joined in 2018.
Additionally, the museum announced that it has received a generous $2 million gift from BMA trustee and longtime Baltimore-based philanthropist Anne L. Stone to endow a curatorial position in the Decorative Arts department. The funds are currently applied to the position of Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts, which is held by Brittany Luberda, a scholar of 18th-century objects and furniture who has been with the BMA since 2019. In recognition of Stone’s gift, the position is named the Anne Stone Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts. This named endowment will also follow future promotions in the department. The BMA’s Decorative Arts collection comprises approximately 8,000 works of art, including examples across media from North America, Europe, and non-Indigenous South America from c. 2500 BCE through the present day.
“We are delighted to have such exceptional scholars to support the BMA’s mission. Dr. Lara Yeager-Crasselt’s appointment brings an incredible depth of knowledge, experience organizing world-class exhibitions, and alignment with our mission for equity and scholarship that will be invaluable to the ongoing development of the museum’s curatorial vision. Dr. Leslie Cozzi is an outstanding scholar, curator, and colleague who has a record of championing underrepresented artists with her acquisitions and exhibitions,” said Dr. Asma Naeem, Interim Co-Director and The Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Chief Curator at the BMA. “And we are deeply grateful to our trustee and friend Anne Stone for her generous gift to endow the position of Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts, which highlights the importance of the department. The decorative arts are crucial to the museum’s mission to connect Baltimore communities and upend hierarchies of painting and sculpture.”
Yeager-Crasselt is a renowned scholar of early modern European art with significant experience in curating, teaching, and writing on a range of subjects in the field. Prior to joining the BMA, Yeager-Crasselt served as Curator of The Leiden Collection, a private collection of Dutch and Flemish art based in New York. There, she co-edited the online catalogue and oversaw the collection’s research, loans, and exhibitions, including co-curating its global tour with exhibitions at Louvre Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates; the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and The State Hermitage Museum in Russia; and the National Museum of China in Beijing. Closer to home, she developed the collection’s focus exhibitions with recent shows at the Loeb Art Center at Vassar College and Exchanging Words: Women and Letters in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, currently on view at the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego. Previously, Yeager-Crasselt held positions at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; and KU Leuven as a Belgian American Educational Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow. Her publications include Michael Sweerts (1618-1664): Shaping the Artist and Academy in Rome and Brussels (Brepols, 2016), as well as numerous exhibition catalogues and articles in peer-reviewed journals. She has held teaching positions at several universities, and her research focuses on artists working in the Southern Netherlands and Brussels, the dynamics of artistic exchange between the Low Countries and Italy, as well as broader issues of artistic mobility, identity, and collaboration. Yeager-Crasselt earned her PhD in Art History from the University of Maryland and her BA in History, Art History, and French from Vassar College.
Dr. Leslie Cozzi joined the staff of the BMA in the fall of 2018 as Associate Curator in the department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs. She is responsible for the museum’s post-1900 collection of works on paper, and over the past four years has curated exhibitions on the work of William Cordova, SHAN Wallace, Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, Zackary Drucker, Ana Mendieta, and Valerie Maynard. She co-curated the critically acclaimed survey A Modern Influence: Henri Matisse, Etta Cone and Baltimore and is currently organizing solo exhibitions on Darrel Ellis and Omar Ba. Prior to her arrival at the BMA, Cozzi was the 2017-2018 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/National Endowment for the Humanities Post-Doctoral Rome Prize Winner in Modern Italian Studies at the American Academy in Rome, where she conducted research on the intersections between feminism, race, and text in post-war and contemporary Italian art. Between 2013 and 2017, Cozzi served as the Curatorial Associate at the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the Hammer Museum. She received her PhD from the University of Virginia in 2012 and her BA from Yale University in 2003.
Brittany Luberda is a scholar of 18th-century objects and furniture, and as the Anne Stone Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts, she oversees and works with a growing collection of approximately 8,000 objects and furniture from North America, Europe, and non-Indigenous South America. She curated the exhibition She Knew Where She Was Going: Gee’s Bend Quilts and Civil Rights, co-curated a major reinstallation of the American Modernism collection, and is currently organizing an exhibition of works by regional artists who have received a Baker Artist Award. Prior to joining the BMA in 2019, Luberda spent three years as the Research Assistant in Decorative Arts and Design at the Saint Louis Art Museum, where she studied European and American decorative arts from the 15th through 19th centuries. From 2013 to 2016, Luberda was a department assistant in both Conservation and Decorative Arts at The Frick Collection in New York. She has additional curatorial experience at the Dallas Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago. Luberda holds an MA in Art History from Southern Methodist University and a BA in Art History from the University of Chicago.
Anne L. Stone is a Baltimore native and a longtime supporter of local education and arts organizations. She has a passionate interest in the arts and collects fine art, craft furniture, and fine American antiques. A BMA Trustee since 2021, Stone has been very supportive of the museum for many years as an active Council Member and generous contributor of works of art. Her early education in Baltimore was at Calvert and Bryn Mawr schools, along with piano training at the Peabody Institute. After earning her master’s degree in Library Science, Stone worked in Manhattan at a publishing company before returning to Baltimore and working at the Enoch Pratt Free Library. She has previously served on the boards of the Choral Arts Society and Maryland SPCA and volunteered extensively at the Forbush School at Sheppard Pratt.
