Cristina Aldrich, a doctoral student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, joins the Meadows Museum for a year beginning in September 2023 as a new Center for Spain in America (CSA) Curatorial Fellow. The fellowship provides her with the opportunity to develop new scholarship in Spanish art drawing on the Meadows Museum’s collections and gain professional experience in the curatorial department. Her doctoral research focuses on Iberian art of the Middle Ages, and her dissertation explores the sacred place of the Virgin Mary in medieval Castilian sculpture. The Meadows Museum’s extensive holdings of Spanish painting and sculpture include many objects that engage with themes central to her dissertation.

Aldrich holds an MA from the Institute of Fine Arts and a BA from Cornell University. She joins the Meadows Museum with more than five years of museum experience: from 2022 to 2023, she was the Marica and Jan Vilcek Curatorial Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and she spent a combined four years at the Hispanic Society of America as an intern in the Education Department and as Development Coordinator. Aldrich has received the Shelby White and Leon Levy Travel Grant at the Institute of Fine Arts and both the J.G. White Prize for excellence in Spanish and the Sampson Fine Arts Prize at Cornell University.

In 1962, Dallas businessman and philanthropist Algur H. Meadows donated his private collection of Spanish paintings, as well as funds to start a museum, to Southern Methodist University. The museum opened to the public in 1965, marking the first step in fulfilling Meadows’s vision to create “a small Prado for Texas.” Today, the Meadows is home to one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Spanish art outside of Spain. The collection spans from the 10th to the 21st centuries and includes medieval objects, Renaissance and Baroque sculptures, and major paintings by Golden Age and modern masters.

More information about the fellowship