The Clark Art Institute announced last week that CODART member Lara Yeager-Crasselt has been appointed to serve as the first Aso O. Tavitian Curator of Early Modern European Painting and Sculpture. She will begin work at the Clark in December 2025.
In her new role, Lara Yeager-Crasselt will assume stewardship of the Aso O. Tavitian Collection, playing a major part in shaping how the works of art from the transformative Tavitian gift will be shared with visitors in the years ahead. She will join the Institute’s cross-departmental team planning the construction of the Tavitian Wing. This building project, designed by Selldorf Architects of New York City, will get underway in early 2027 and will provide a permanent home for the Tavitian Collection. Yeager-Crasselt will also work with the Clark’s full collection of fifteenth- through eighteenth-century paintings and sculpture, utilizing her prior experience with the Clark’s existing collection to integrate the Tavitian Collection and develop the plan for its installation in the new museum wing.
2026 Exhibition
The first opportunity for Yeager-Crasselt to present some of the treasures in the Tavitian Collection to the public will be during the Clark Art Institute’s Summer 2026 exhibition, An Exquisite Eye: Introducing the Tavitian Collection. This show opens on 13 June 2026, and is set to showcase works by acclaimed artists of the early modern era, including Jan van Eyck, Andrea della Robbia, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Peter Paul Rubens, Jean-Antoine Watteau, and Jacques Louis David, among others. An Exquisite Eye will remain on view through 21 February 2027.
Lara Yeager-Crasselt
Yeager-Crasselt is currently the Curator and Department Head of European Painting and Sculpture at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where she oversees the museum’s collection of fifteenth- through eighteenth-century painting and sculpture, including its research, exhibition, loans, acquisitions, and publication. Prior to her current role at the Baltimore Museum of Art, she held curatorial and research positions at The Leiden Collection in New York and at KU Leuven, Belgium, among others. From 2015–2017, Yeager-Crasselt served as the Clark’s Interim Curator of Painting and Sculpture.
Yeager-Crasselt’s curatorial experience includes a rich array of international exhibitions including Watershed: Transforming the Landscape in Early Modern Dutch Art (Baltimore Museum of Art); Exchanging Words: Women and Letters in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting (Timken Museum of Art, San Diego); Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Dutch Golden Age: Masterpieces of The Leiden Collection and the Musée du Louvre (Louvre Abu Dhabi); The Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer: Masterpieces of The Leiden Collection (Pushkin Museum, Moscow and The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia), and Splendor, Myth, and Vision: Nudes from the Prado at the Clark.
Aso O. Tavitian Collection
The Aso O. Tavitian Collection was gifted to the Clark in 2024 from the foundation of the late collector, philanthropist, and connoisseur, Aso O. Tavitian. Between 2004 and 2020, Tavitian assembled the most significant private collection of European art assembled in North America in the twenty-first century. Representing one of the largest gifts in the Clark’s history, the Tavitian gift includes 331 works of art from Tavitian’s personal collection and more than $45 million to endow two new positions on the Clark’s curatorial staff to oversee the collection; provide necessary support for its long-term care; and fund construction of the Aso O. Tavitian Wing at the Clark, which is slated to open in 2028. The gift of art includes 132 paintings, 130 sculptures, thirty-nine drawings, and thirty decorative arts objects, creating an important addition to the Clark’s holdings and more than doubling the size of its sculpture collection.