ADVISOR

Professor Joseph Manca

Interested in the intersections of taste, travel, and the building of collections, Claire Spadafora Baes’s research considers the collecting of Italian drawings on the British Grand Tour. Her dissertation (2024) explored eighteenth-century artist William Kent (c. 1685-1748) and his training, artistic production, and work as an agent in Italy, a topic she has continued to pursue in her current book project on the movement of drawings within English expatriate and tourist circles in Rome. She has taught courses on the topics of museums and cultural heritage, art of the Italian Renaissance, Baroque art, and the history of the print. She has held curatorial internships and fellowships at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Blanton Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and is now a curator at LACMA specializing in Old Master works on paper.

EDUCATION

PhD, Rice University 2024
MA, Art History, University of Illinois, Chicago
BA, Art History, Washington and Lee University

PUBLICATIONS

Spadafora Baes, Claire. “‘Remarks by Way of Painting and Archit:’ William Kent’s Italian Journal.” Volume of the Walpole Society LXXXIII (October 2021): 70-121.

Spadafora Baes, Claire. “Rome’s First Guida Popolare: Giuseppe Vasi’s Itinerario Istruttivo.” Notes on Early Modern Art 4, no. 2 (2017): 1-10.

AWARDS

2023    Los Angeles County Museum of Art Wallis Annenberg Fellowship
2022    Los Angeles County Museum of Art Getty Paper Project Fellowship
2021    Rice University Lodieska Stockbridge Vaughn Fellowship
2021    Rice University James T. Wagoner Foreign Study Scholarship 
2021    Rice University Brown Foundation Mentored Teaching Award
2020    Paul Mellon Centre Andrew Wyld Research Support Grant
2019    Bayou Bend Collection & Gardens, Jameson Fellowship
2019    Rice University Department of Art History Brown Foundation Dissertation Research Award
2019    Rice University Department of Art History Brown Foundation Research Fellowship
2019    Blanton Museum of Art International Fine Print Dealers Association Fellowship
2018    Museum of Fine Arts Houston William A. Camfield Fellowship
2018    Rice University Department of Art History Summer Research Award
2017    Rice University Department of Art History Summer Research Award
2017    Museum of Fine Arts Houston Mellon Foundation Director’s Initiative Fellowship
2015    Museum of Fine Arts Houston Samuel H. Kress Interpretive Fellowship