Free with Museum admission / Free for members 

This talk will begin with an examination of Fede Galizia’s contributions to the burgeoning art of still life painting in Italy of the first half of the seventeenth century. Taking her lead, the lecture will explore the other ways that women artists innovated in early modern Italy from Artemisia Gentileschi’s original and dynamic compositions to Giovanna Garzoni’s whimsical world of fruit, flowers, and fauna. A world where—against all odds—hundreds of women found ways to create and compete as artists will be revealed. 

An authority on Italian painting in the early modern period and an expert on early modern women artists and patrons, Eve Straussman-Pflanzer joined the National Gallery of Art in 2020 as curator and head of Italian and Spanish paintings. She was previously the head of the European art department and the Elizabeth and Allan Shelden Curator of European Paintings at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) from 2016-2020, and has held posts at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum in Massachusetts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Prior to her tenure at the DIA, Straussman-Pflanzer served as assistant director of curatorial affairs/senior curator of collections at the Davis Museum, where she oversaw the reinstallation of the permanent collection and curated the first monographic exhibition in the United States devoted to the 17th-century Florentine artist Carlo Dolci. She also curated a groundbreaking exhibition on Renaissance and baroque Italian women artists, which opened at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, in October 2020 and at the DIA in February 2021. At The Met and the Art Institute of Chicago, Straussman-Pflanzer researched and published on European painting and sculpture from the Renaissance to the 18th century. At the Art Institute, she also curated the 2013 exhibition Violence and Virtue: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes. Current projects include upcoming exhibitions on the 17th-century Spanish sculptor Luisa Roldán and the Italian Mannerist painter Pontormo. 

 Straussman-Pflanzer received a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University and a BA from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.