Join us for an evening with Dr. Eve Straussman-Pflanzer, curator and head of Italian and Spanish paintings at the National Gallery of Art, and Dr. Malachai Komanoff Bandy, Assistant Professor of Music. This interdisciplinary program, which will feature a lecture and a musical lecture-performance, is in honor of the Benton exhibition 500 Years of Italian Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum. Through examples of early-modern paintings, drawings, and music, Dr. Straussman- Pflanzer and Dr. Bandy will highlight the importance of gender, process, and interconnectivity in the Italian arts. Co-sponsored by Pomona College Music Department. Register for the event.
About Eve Straussman-Pflanzer
An expert on early-modern women artists and patrons, and authority on early-modern Italian painting, Eve Straussman-Pflanzer joined the National Gallery of Art as curator and head of Italian and Spanish paintings in 2020. She was previously the head of the European art department and the Elizabeth and Allan Shelden Curator of European Paintings at the Detroit Institute of Arts from 2016-2020, and has held positions at Wellesley College's Davis Museum in Massachusetts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Straussman-Pflanzer also served as assistant director of curatorial affairs and senior curator of collections at the Davis Museum, where she oversaw the reinstallation of the permanent collection and curated the first monographic exhibition in the United States devoted to the 17th-century Florentine artist Carlo Dolci. She has also curated By Her Hand Artemisia Gentileschi and Women Artists in Italy, 1500-1800 at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and Detroit Institute of the Arts and Violence and Virtue: Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith Slaying Holofernes at the Art Insitute of Chicago. Straussman-Pflanzer received a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University and a BA from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts
About Malachai Komanoff Bandy
Multi-instrumentalist Malachai Komanoff Bandy is Assistant Professor of Music at Pomona College, where he teaches music history courses handling topics ranging from musical symbolism, esotericism, and rhetoric to music and queer identities. He holds a Ph.D. in historical musicology from the USC Thornton School of Music, supported by Provost and Oakley Endowed Fellowships. In 2019, Bandy received the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music’s Irene Alm Memorial Prize and the AMS Pacific Southwest Chapter’s Ingolf Dahl Award in Musicology, for his investigations of Dieterich Buxtehude’s mathematical compositional practices. As a historical string and double-reed player, Bandy has performed with ensembles including The Orpheon Consort, Ars Lyrica Houston, Bach Collegium San Diego, Voices of Music, Musica Angelica, Tesserae Baroque, Ciaramella, and as a viola da gamba soloist with the Los Angeles Opera and Master Chorale, with whom he opened the Salzburger Festspiele in 2023. On recording, Bandy’s historical string solos are featured in the scores to Outlander, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Season 1), Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Foundation, The Witcher, God of War, and more. Bandy’s scholarly projects concern Christian mysticism and esotericism in North-German Baroque repertoires, as well as viola da gamba technique, instrument design, and iconography. Recent work can be read in the journal Early Music and in the volume Explorations in Music and Esotericism (University of Rochester Press). He is a founder and artistic director of the viol ensemble Artifex Consort, based in Los Angeles.
