That Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) announced dr. Lara Yeager Crasselt was appointed curator of the European Paintings and Sculptures Department, promoted Dr. Leslie Cozzi to curator of prints, drawings and photographs in recognition of her many contributions to the museum since joining in 2018, utilizing a $2 million gift from BMA Brittany Luberda as Anne Stone Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts.
Yeager-Crasselt is a scholar and curator of early modern European art, specializing in painting, sculpture and tapestries produced in northern Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. As part of her new role, she will oversee the reimagining of the BMA galleries for European art from the 15th to the 19th centuries, with a particular focus on expanding the narratives told through the museum’s extensive holdings.
Yeager-Crasselt is a renowned scholar of early modern European art with significant experience curating, teaching and writing on a range of subjects in the field. Before joining the BMA, Yeager-Crasselt was curator of the Leiden Collection, a private collection of Dutch and Flemish art based in New York. There she was co-editor of the online catalog and oversaw the collection’s research, loans and exhibitions, including co-curating its worldwide 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.
Cozzi has been an Associate Curator in the Department of Prints, Drawings and Photography at the BMA since autumn 2018.
She is responsible for the museum’s collection of post-1900 works on paper and has curated exhibitions of the work of William Cordova, Shan Wallace, Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, Zackary Drucker, Ana Mendieta and Valerie Maynard for the past four years. She co-curated the critically acclaimed study A Modern Influence: Henri Matisse, Etta Cone and Baltimore and is currently organizing solo exhibitions on Darrel Ellis and Omar Ba.
Luberda is an expert on 18th-century objects and furniture and, as Anne Stone’s Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts, 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 new installation of the American Modernism collection, and is currently organizing an exhibition featuring work by local Baker Artist Award-winning artists. Before joining the BMA in 2019, Luberda spent three years as a research assistant in decorative arts and design at the Saint Louis Art Museum, studying European and American decorative arts from the 15th to the 19th centuries.
From 2013 to 2016, Luberda was the Conservation and Decorative Arts Department Assistant 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.
