On this curator tour, women take center stage, both as artists and as subjects of artistic interest in the history of European art. We'll consider how stories featuring women from the Bible and ancient mythology--painted by men for men--could reinforce unequal power dynamics. Over the course of an hour, we'll examine images that depict women as sinners, victims, and objects of sexual desire alongside entirely different paintings created by women who became professional artists against the odds.
The tour will be led by Isabella Lores-Chavez, the Associate Curator of European Paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. She is the curator of the exhibition “Celebrating 100 Years at the Legion of Honor,” on view through November 2. Isabella completed her Ph.D. in Art History at Columbia University in 2022, with a dissertation about plaster casts in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. Her doctoral work was supported by prestigious fellowships from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. After completing a B.A. in Art History at Yale, in 2013 Isabella curated a small exhibition at the Met, entitled Dutch and French Genre Drawings from the Robert Lehman Collection. Born in Colombia and raised in Los Angeles, she has also worked at the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
A commedia dell'arte party!