Darrin Lunde is Collections Manager in the Department of Vertebrate Zoology/Mammals. During his twenty years of experience at the American Museum and the National Museum of Natural History, he has been active in promoting the shared missions of these and other great mammal collections around the world. He actively conducts field work, leading expeditions throughout the Americas, Africa, and Southeast Asia, and has named more than a dozen new species of mammals. Through his work and numerous publications, he has shed new light on hundreds of other, lesser-known species and helped to illuminate the rich diversity of mammals with which we share the world. He received his B.S. in Animal Sciences from Cornell University and his M.A. in Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and Systematics at the City College of New York.

Floyd Shockley is Collections Manager in the Department of Entomology, where he oversees all aspects of collection management, logistics, purchasing and property management for the Department of Entomology, where he serves as chair of the Entomology Collections Committee and provides oversight of the National Insect Collection (100,000+ type specimens, 35 million+ specimens). He has published widely on the taxonomy and systematics of fungus feeding beetles. In his research, he reconstructs phylogenetic relationships of Endomychidae using cladistics, likelihood and Bayesian techniques incorporating both morphological and molecular evidence and uses the resulting evolutionary hypotheses to explore patterns of change in physical, behavioral, and ecological characteristics. He received a B.A. at Westminster College, an M.S. University of Missouri, and Ph.D. University of Georgia.

Dario Robleto is a Houston-based transdisciplinary artist, researcher, writer, and teacher. His research-driven practice results in intricately handcrafted objects that reflect his exploration of music, popular culture, science, war, and American history. Over the last twenty years, Robleto’s work has explored the intersections of music, popular culture, language, storytelling, and the histories of science and war. He draws upon unconventional materials spanning from archival materials to meteorites to heartbeat recordings from the 19th century. A self-proclaimed “citizen-scientist,” Robleto pursues deep collaborations with experts across fields of inquiry spanning astrophysics, cardiology, glaciology, and neuroscience. He has been a research fellow or artist in residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the SETI Institute, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the Artist-at-Large program at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Block Museum of Art, and at the National Gallery’s Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts. His work has been exhibited widely and is held in prominent collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Menil Collection, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art.

Brooks Rich is Associate Curator of Old Master and Nineteenth-Century Prints at the National Gallery of Art. Since arriving in Washington in 2019, he has curated the exhibitions The Renaissance in the North: New Prints and Perspectives (2022) and Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World (2025). He previously held curatorial fellowships at the Rijksmuseum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art and worked at the Clark Art Institute and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Rich holds a Ph.D. in the history of art from the University of Pennsylvania, with a specialization in sixteenth-century Netherlandish engraving. He also has an M.A. from Williams College and a B.A. from Bowdoin College.

Alexandra Libby is Senior Administrator for Collections and Initiatives and Acting Head and Curator of Northern European Paintings at the National Gallery of Art. During her ten years at the museum, she has curated Water, Wind, and Waves: Marine Paintings from the Dutch Golden Age (2018); Vermeer’s Secrets (2022); and Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World (2025). She has also published and lectured widely on 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painting, including contributions to exhibition and collection catalogs, volumes of collected essays, and scholarly journals. Prior to joining the National Gallery, she was assistant curator of European art at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota. She earned her Ph.D. in the history of art from the University of Maryland and her M.A. from Boston University, and her B.A. from Colby College.

Frima Fox Hofrichter, Professor Emerita at Pratt Institute, NYC, has specialized in Northern Art of the seventeenth-century, issues of gender, class, and women artists of the Early Modern Period. She is best known for her monograph and related scholarship on Judith Leyster and the art of Haarlem. She is member of the Advisory Board for Women Artists, From Antwerp to Amsterdam (1600-1750) and contributed to its catalogue.

Reclaiming the Forgotten
In her lecture Hofrichter will address the variety of subjects and mediums in which women artists worked, including lacemaking, embroidery, glass etching, papercutting, and water coloring. She will discuss how and why, many of these methods have been historically relegated to the lower rung of “women’s work,” despite comprising a large swath of the visual culture of the time. Connections between many of the women artists will be examined. Further, she will explore how women artists defined themselves and sought to present their authority through their self-portraits.

Elena Kanagy-Loux is a PhD student at Bard Graduate Center whose research into global lace history and the lives of lacemakers is grounded in her own experience as a maker. After earning her BFA in Textile Design from FIT, she won a grant funding a four-month trip to study lacemaking across Europe in 2015. Upon returning to NYC, she co-founded Brooklyn Lace Guild and began teaching bobbin lace classes. She then completed an MA in Costume Studies at NYU and worked at the Antonio Ratti Textile Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for five years. She has created specially-commissioned lace projects for the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the 2022 exhibition Threads of Power at Bard Graduate Center, and lectures widely on lace and textile history.

Depictions, Perceptions, and Realities of Dutch and Flemish Lacemakers in Seventeenth-Century Portraits
How did idyllic portraits of lacemakers in domestic settings contrast with their public perception and lived realities? The proliferation of portraits of bobbin lacemakers in the Dutch Golden Age is a testament to the way in which this technique and its makers captured the imagination of their contemporaries. Painters like Vermeer and Nicolaes Maes were enamored of the subject of female domesticity, depicting women at their pillows in docile solitude. However, this genre of portraits is more reflective of the artists’ idealized visions of feminine virtue and should not be taken at face value. This paper analyzes the settings and dress of lacemakers in painted and engraved portraits alongside contemporary texts and archival records of lace production to pull back the layers of misconception shrouding this female-dominated industry.

The collection is global in scale and universal in subject matter. Among its Netherlandish treasures is the 1492 Luneborch Prayer Book attributed to the Master of the Dark Eyes, bearing 44 illuminated miniatures, as well as other 15th-century masterpieces. One of the earliest Flemish imprints is a handsomely illuminated copy of John of Salisbury’s Polycraticus (Brotherhood of the Common Life, ca. 1480), one of a number of other significant Netherlandish incunabula and early printed books.

In preparation for a major forthcoming rare book exhibition on Flemish Renaissance print culture, dozens of later Renaissance era rare books and printed ephemera will also be made available for CODART members to see. These will include Christophe Plantin’s first printed book, as well as rare or otherwise unique Plantin-Moretus productions, amongst others books in uncut sheets, broadsides regulating the Antwerp print trade, as well as hand-colored popular prints.

Dr. Earle Havens is the Nancy H. Hall Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, and Director of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance at Johns Hopkins University, where he is also Adjunct Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. He is currently collaborating with Dr. Joran Proot, curator of the Cultura Fonds collection of rare Flemish imprints based in Dilbeek (near Brussels), on a 2028 exhibition entitled “The Flemish Golden Age of Printing.”