ST. LOUIS, MAY 24, 2023—Hannah Segrave has been appointed associate curator of European art to 1800 at the Saint Louis Art Museum, starting in June.
Segrave recently served as a lecturer in the art history and French and Italian Studies departments at the Ohio State University after completing her doctoral dissertation in Baroque art history from the University of Delaware in 2022. Her expertise in European art runs the gamut from the art of the ancient Mediterranean to 14th-century Italian sculpture to 17th-century French, Italian and British paintings, with a particular interest in witchcraft-related art from the Baroque period.
“Hannah has a creative energy that, mixed with the breadth of her knowledge in European art, will enhance the ways in which we showcase our collection,” said Judith W. Mann, senior curator of European art to 1800. “Hannah also possesses a deep understanding in crafting gallery text that will help us reach a broad spectrum of visitors.”
The department of European art to 1800 oversees a range of artworks, spanning the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world to the art in western and eastern Europe made in the 18th century. Segrave’s expertise will not only enhance the museum’s ongoing research on the collection of 16th- and 17th-century paintings, but she will also be fully involved in working with the Renaissance and Baroque terracotta and bronze sculptures that were given to the museum in 2021 by Mark Weil and Phoebe Dent Weil.
As a doctoral curatorial intern at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Segrave curated the 2015 exhibition “The Novel and the Bizarre: Salvator Rosa’s Scenes of Witchcraft.” She continued to unpack Rosa’s entire body of witchcraft imagery through her dissertation “Conjuring Genius: Salvator Rosa and the Dark Arts of Witchcraft” and her 2022 essay “The Witch’s Body – Salvator Rosa’s La Strega (1647–1650),” which was published in “Magic: A Companion,” edited by Katharina Rein. She’s also written online catalogue entries related to Rosa’s works for the Metropolitan Museum of Art where she was the Andrew W. Mellon Predoctoral Art History Fellow in the Department of European Paintings from 2018 to 2019.
Segrave has held several other fellowships including the University of Delaware’s Robert R. David Graduate Fellowship and the University Dissertation Fellowship, both based in Rome, a research fellowship at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and a Prints Curatorial Fellowship at the Cincinnati Museum of Art. She also held an internship at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and was the recipient of the Kress Foundation Travel Grant from the Renaissance Society of America.
The addition of Segrave’s position is the second recent change in the museum’s curatorial department in recent months. Melissa Venator, who started at the museum in 2019 as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow for Modern Art, has been appointed assistant curator of modern art with a focus in modern German art.
CONTACT: Molly Morris, 314.655.5250, molly.morris@slam.org
Hannah Segrave