Art and Archives: Betye Saar and Isabella Stewart Gardner

Makeda Best is a curator, writer, and historian of photography. She currently serves as the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museums. Her exhibitions include: Time is Now – Photography and Social Change in James Baldwin’s America (2018), Crossing Lines, Constructing Home: Displacement and Belonging in Contemporary Art (2019) and Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography Since 1970 (2021). Devour the Land was awarded the 2022 Photography Catalogue of the Year by Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation. Her book is Elevate the Masses – Alexander Gardner, Photography and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America (Penn State Press, 2020). She is co-editor of Conflict, Identity, and Protest in American Art (2016). She is the co-curator, with Kevin Moore, of the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial exhibition One the Line – Documents of Risk and Faith. Her Spring 2023 exhibition is Please Stay Home: Darrel Ellis in Dialogue with Leslie Hewitt and Wardell Milan. She has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogs and journals. She holds an MFA in studio photography from the California Institute of the Arts and a PhD from Harvard University.

Diana Seave Greenwald is an art historian and economic historian. She currently serves as the William and Lia Poorvu Interim Curator of the Collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where she has curated Betye Saar: Heart of A Wanderer and Fellow Wanderer: Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Travel Albums, among other exhibitions. Prior to joining the Gardner, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., working in the departments of American and British Paintings and Modern Prints and Drawings. Her first book, Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art, was published by Princeton University Press in 2021. She holds a BA in Art History from Columbia University, an M.Phil. in Economic and Social History from the University of Oxford and a D.Phil. in History from the University of Oxford.