Drawings have long been appreciated for the insight they offer into the artist's mind and process. Presented in collaboration with Trois Crayons, this lecture series features Professor Amy Freund of SMU, Verónica Muñoz-Nájar of the Thoma Foundation, and the DMA's own Emily Friedman. Each speaker will present a case study on 18th-century drawings, offering new insight into rare drawings from the DMA's permanent collection as well as from further afield.
Schedule:
5:30–6:30 p.m., Reception, Hamon Atrium
7:00–8:00 p.m., Lecture, Horchow Auditorium
About the speakers:
Dr. Emily Friedman is the inaugural Allen and Kelli Questrom Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Dallas Museum of Art. Prior to joining the DMA in 2024, Friedman held positions at several institutions, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she collaborated on the first iteration of the Brand X Editions exhibition. At the DMA, she has curated On Stage: Society and Dance, 1860–1920, Roy Lichtenstein in the Studio, and Paper Technologies: Italian Prints and Drawings. She holds a PhD in History of Art from the Johns Hopkins University, and her research has been supported by organizations such as the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the Association for Print Scholars.
Dr. Verónica Muñoz-Nájar Luque is Associate Curator of Art of the Spanish Americas at the Thoma Foundation. She completed her PhD at UC Berkeley in 2023 and her MA at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. She specializes in colonial Latin American art, and previously worked at the Museo de Arte de Lima and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Dr. Amy Freund is an associate professor and the Kleinheinz Family Endowed Chair in Art History at Southern Methodist University. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and began her teaching career in the SMU art history department in 2005 as a Haakon Predoctoral Fellow. She subsequently held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. Before joining the SMU faculty in 2014, she was an assistant professor at Texas Christian University.
Freund is a specialist in 18th-century European art. Her first book, Portraiture and Politics in Revolutionary France (Penn State University Press, 2014), examines the ways in which sitters and artists used portraiture to reformulate personal and political identity during the French Revolution. Articles related to this project have been published in Eighteenth-Century Studies and The Art Bulletin, and in Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789–1914 (Ashgate, 2010). Her second book, Noble Beasts: Hunters and Hunted in Eighteenth-Century French Art (Yale University Press, 2026) analyzes the representation of the hunt in late 17th- and 18th-century France. Research from this project has been published in Art History, Journal18, and several edited volumes. Freund is also second vice-president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) and past president of Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA).
About Trois Crayons:
Trois Crayons was founded by Alesa Boyle, Tom Nevile, and Sebastien Paraskevas with the aim of increasing the awareness, accessibility, and visibility of drawings in all their forms. Trois Crayons is a venture from Mariette & Co., the company also behind Studiolo. Trois Crayons offers a centralizing space for all drawing-related activity worldwide to facilitate and encourage engagement with the historic “father” of the arts. From in-person exhibitions and collaborative events, to our acclaimed monthly newsletter and social media activity, we connect the global drawings community.
