Emily J. Peters

Emily J. Peters joined the museum as curator of prints and drawings in 2017. She has organized numerous exhibitions featuring the museum’s collection of prints and drawings, such as Ashcan School Prints and the American City, 1900–1940 (2021); Who RU2 DAY: Mass Media and the Fine Art Print (2019); and Graphic Discontent: German Expressionism on Paper (2018); and loan exhibitions, including Tales of the City: Drawing in the Netherlands from Bosch to Bruegel (2022), a collaboration with the Albertina Museum, Vienna, and Michelangelo: Mind of the Master (2019), a collaboration with the Teylers Museum in Haarlem and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Peters edited and authored catalogues for both Tales of the City (with Laura Ritter) and Michelangelo (with Julian Brooks). Peters’s publications investigate works on paper made by European artists of the early modern period as well as the relationships between printed images and public spectacle in the 16th century and include articles on Jan Gossaert, Diana Mantuana, Rembrandt van Rijn, engraving technique, and joyous entry processions in Antwerp. Peters complements her curatorial work by supervising graduate fellows and teaching in the museum’s joint program in art history with Case Western Reserve University and by serving one of the museum’s affiliate groups, the Print Club of Cleveland.

Before joining the museum, Peters was associate curator of prints, drawings, and photographs at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, where she organized more than 15 exhibitions, among which a highlight was the 2010 exhibition and catalogue The Brilliant Line: Following the Early Modern Engraver. Peters holds an MA and a PhD in art history from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a BA in art history from the University of Michigan. She held a predoctoral Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a Belgian American Educational Foundation Fellowship for doctoral research in Belgium.

Contact the Curator: printsdrawings@clevelandart.org