Thursday, May 29, 2025
6:30 – 8 pm EDT
Scheuer Auditorium

The Mildred and George Weissman Program

Hear a panel of art historians and curators discuss Rembrandt’s depictions of women, ranging from the images of Esther in the exhibition to his images of classical and mythological characters, held in conjunction with the special exhibition The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt. Featuring Michele Frederick, Curator of European Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art; Shelley Perlove, Professor Emerita, University of Michigan-Dearborn; and Joanna Seidenstein, Metropolitan Museum of Art, moderated by Stephanie Dickey, Professor Emerita and former Bader Chair in Northern Baroque Art at Queen's University.

About the speakers: 

Stephanie Dickey is a Professor Emerita of Art History at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada, where she held the Bader Chair in Northern Baroque Art from 2006 to 2024. Stephanie earned her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and previously taught at Indiana University. She has served as an external advisor to the National Gallery of Canada and is a Board member of Historians of Netherlandish Art. Dickey is the author or editor of five books and numerous essays on Rembrandt and related artists with emphasis on the history of portraiture, printmaking, and the representation of emotion. She has contributed to exhibitions for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Rembrandt House in Amsterdam, and other museums. In 2021 she co-organized the exhibition Rembrandt in Amsterdam: Creativity and Competition, held at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, and the National Gallery of Canada. Current research topics include the prints of Samuel van Hoogstraten and the representation of female models by Rembrandt and artists in his circle.
 
Michele Frederick is Curator of European Art and Provenance Research at the North Carolina Museum of Art, where she is responsible for the Museum’s important collection of Northern European paintings. She holds a PhD in seventeenth-century Dutch art from the University of Delaware. She has previously held positions at Berea College and The Cleveland Museum of Art and served as the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Interpretive Fellow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Samuel H. Kress Predoctoral Fellow at The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. She is co-curator of The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt, which will travel to the North Carolina Museum of Art in fall 2025.
 
Shelley Perlove, Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, has been teaching since 2012 in the History of Art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. A specialist in Italian and Dutch early modern art, with emphasis upon religious culture, social context in the visual arts, Dr. Perlove has written eight books and exhibition catalogues, including Bernini and the Idealization of Death and Rembrandt’s Faith: Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age, and was the co-editor for Visual Typology in Early Modern Europe. Dr. Perlove is also the author of 40 articles dealing with Rembrandt and such other artists as Callot, Bernini, Justus Sustermans, Guercino, and Heemskerck. She was consultant for the exhibition, "Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus," which opened in the Louvre, and wrote for its catalog. She is presently working on two book projects: the material culture of Brazilian hardwoods and dyes in colonial America and their reception in the Netherlands; and the religious and secular interpretations of the Bible of artists in Rembrandt’s circle.

Joanna Sheers Seidenstein is Assistant Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A specialist of seventeenth-century Dutch art, she is responsible for the museum’s collection of Northern European drawings and prints from the Renaissance to the end of the nineteenth century. In this role, she co-curated, together with Alison Hokanson, the exhibition Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, on view at The Met through May 11. Previous exhibitions include Divine Encounter: Rembrandt’s Abraham and the Angels (presented at The Frick Collection in 2017); Turner’s Modern and Ancient Ports: Passages through Time (co-curated with Susan Galassi and Ian Warrell at the Frick, also in 2017); and Crossroads: Drawing the Dutch Landscape (co-curated with Susan Anderson at the Harvard Art Museums in 2022). Recent publications include Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Atlantic Slave Trade: Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures, which she co-edited with Sarah Mallory, Kéla Jackson, and Rachel Burke (Brill, 2025). She holds a Bachelor’s degree from Vassar College and a Master’s and PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU.

The Mildred and George Weissman Program has been endowed by Paul, Ellen, and Dan Weissman in honor of their parents.

Tickets: $18 General; $15 Students and Seniors; $12 Jewish Museum members

Doors open at 6 pm; Includes Museum Admission