Coffee with a Curator: So You Think You Know Flowers?

Coffee with a Curator: Sarah Cartwright, PhD
So you think you know flowers? Documentation and artistic license in western flower imagery.
July 3, 2024
Join us for this installment of our Coffee with a Curator series, where Museum Staff or invited guests speak on a range of Dalí-inspired topics.
In conjunction with our special exhibition, Reimagining Nature: Dalí’s Floral Fantasies, this month’s talk will feature Sarah Cartwright, PhD. Though we may think that botanical illustrations simply “document” the appearance of a flower, the reproduction of nature in visual art is never so straightforward. In this talk, inspired by Dalí’s imaginative reworkings of botanical illustrations, we’ll look at a range of historic flower images from the Western artistic tradition to consider how artists represent nature and how we perceive and characterize their work.
Sarah Cartwright, PhD
Sarah Cartwright is Chief Curator and Ulla R. Searing Curator of Collections at The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, a unit of Florida State University. At The Ringling, Dr. Cartwright oversees the curatorial department and is responsible for the museum’s collection of European and American paintings, sculpture, and works on paper from antiquity to 1900 CE. A specialist in Italian Renaissance art, with a particular focus on manuscript illumination, she has worked and published on a wide range of topics. Dr. Cartwright earned her PhD in Art History and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and her M.A. in Art History from New York University.
Most recently, she curated the exhibition Shinique Smith: PARADE (on view at The Ringling through January 5, 2025) and co-curated, with Dr. David M. Stone, the international loan exhibition Guercino’s Friar with a Gold Earring: Fra Bonaventura Bisi, Painter and Art Dealer, and co-authored its catalogue. Prior to joining The Ringling, she worked in a curatorial capacity at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at Villa La Pietra in Florence, Italy, and taught art history in New York City as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University and in Sarasota as a visiting professor at Ringling College of Art and Design.