Roberta Olson
Roberta J. M. Olson received her Ph.D. in Art History from Princeton University. Since 2000 she has served as Curator of Drawings at the New-York Historical Society and Professor Emeritus of Art History at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where she taught for 25 years and chaired the Department. In addition to guest-curating exhibitions for museums in the United States, among them the National Gallery of Art and the Walters Art Museum, she has co-curated others in Italy and France. Among the exhibitions she has curated at the Historical Society during her tenure are the following: Seat of Empire; the five-part series Audubon’s Aviary; Drawn by New York: Six Centuries of Watercolors and Drawings at the New-York Historical Society; the highly acclaimed trilogy Audubon’s Aviary: The Complete Flock; Picasso’s “Le Tricorne”; Maestà: Gaddi’s Triptych Reunited, and Folk Art: The Collection of Elie and Viola Nadelman. Olson’s specialties, in which she has published widely, are drawings, nineteenth-century art, and Italian Renaissance art, while her research interests also encompass topics involving the intersection of art and science, including many articles on John James Audubon. After publishing her theory that Giotto painted Halley’s Comet as the Star of Bethlehem in the Scrovegni Chapel, and the European Space Agency naming its satellite to explore the comet “Giotto,” she has focused on depictions of astronomical phenomena in two books—"Fire and Ice: A History of Comets in Art" and "Fire in the Sky: Comets and Meteors, the Decisive Centuries, in British Art and Science" (co-authored with Jay M. Pasachoff)—as well as in many articles. Her other books and exhibition catalogues include, among others: "Italian Drawings 1780-1890"; "Italian Renaissance Sculpture"; "The Florentine Tondo"; "Ottocento: Romanticism and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Italian Painting"; "The Biography of the Object in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy"; and "Drawn by New York: Six Centuries of Watercolors and Drawings at the New-York Historical Society", which was awarded the prize for the best catalogue of a museum collection by the Association of Art Museum Curators in 2008. Her book "Audubon’s Aviary: The Original Watercolors for 'The Birds of America'” has garnered many honors, including the best catalogue of a museum collection by the Association of Art Museum Curators in 2013, as well as The Henry Allen Moe Prize for Catalogs of Distinction in the Arts for 2013. Her exhibition catalogue "Making It Modern: The Folk Art Collection of Elie and Viola Nadelman" (with Margaret K. Hofer) was noted by the New York Times as one of the best books for 2015 and was awarded other prizes. Her subsequent catalogue "Artist in Exile: The Visual Diary of Baroness Hyde d Neuville" was selected by the Magazine Antiques as a notable book of 2019. That same year she published "Cosmos: The Art and Science of the Universe" (with Jay M. Pasachoff). She continues to research and publish books and articles on drawings and on topics in her specialized areas: the Italian Renaissance and nineteenth-century art.
less
InterestsView All (8)
Uploads
Papers by Roberta Olson