Picturing Isabella

Dr. Erica E. Hirshler, Croll Senior Curator of American Paintings, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) joined the Paintings Department in 1983 and was named Croll Senior Curator of American Paintings, Art of the Americas, in 2001. An expert in late 19th and early 20th-century American painting, she has published extensively on John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, Dennis Bunker, William Merritt Chase, Winslow Homer, and women artists and collectors. Hirshler is particularly interested in the vibrant artistic exchange between the United States and Europe, in issues of national identity, and in the new opportunities available to women during this period. She also studies Boston’s history, art, and patronage. She has written for both scholarly and popular journals and is an admired speaker, lecturing at museums and other cultural institutions across the United States, Europe, and Japan. Dr. Hirshler holds a BA from Wellesley College and an MA and PhD from Boston University. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Terra Foundation of American Art. Her most recent show, an interdisciplinary project exploring John Singer Sargent, fashion, and the construction of identity, will open at the MFA Boston in the fall of 2023 and will travel to Tate Britain in the spring of 2024.

Dr. Erica E. Hirshler, Photo Courtesy of the Artist.

Casey Riley is Chair of the Department of Global Contemporary Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where she oversees the research, exhibition, and publication of the museum's renowned collection of art after 1970. Her curatorial practices are rooted in collaboration and informed by the principles of inclusion and equity. Recent projects at Mia include The Last Safe Abortion with the artist Carmen Winant and American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson, organized in partnership with the Gordon Parks Foundation. In partnership with Mia colleagues and a curatorial council of fourteen artists, scholars, and knowledge sharers, she is co-organizing In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890 to Now, a survey of works by First Nations, Metis, Inuit, and Native American photographic artists, opening at Mia in October 2023. Riley was the assistant curator at the Boston Athenaeum and consulting curator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She has published widely on American art and photographic history, and has most recently co-organized, with Frank Goodyear and Lisa Hostetler, Marcia Resnick: As It Is, Or Could Be, which received the Photography Network Book Prize. An experienced educator, Riley is a graduate of Yale University, holds master’s degrees from Brown University and Middlebury College, and earned her PhD from Boston University. She is a member of the 2023 class of fellows at the Center for Curatorial Leadership in New York City.

Casey Riley, Photo Courtesy of the Artist.

Diana Seave Greenwald is an art historian and economic historian. She currently serves as the William and Lia Poorvu 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.

Diana Seave Greenwald, Photo Courtesy of the Artist.