10/14/2026
Sarah Russell, an art history doctoral candidate at Columbia University, has been named the 2026-27 Center for Spain in America (CSA) Curatorial Fellow at the Meadows Museum in Dallas, Texas. Since starting the fellowship on October 5, 2026, Russell has been pursuing original research in 17th-century Spanish painting at the museum, which has extensive holdings of Spanish art, including works by El Greco, Diego Velázquez, Juan Carreño de Miranda and Claudio Coello. Supported by the Center for Spain in America in collaboration with the Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica (CEEH), the fellowship is designed to advance new scholarship in Spanish art while providing emerging scholars with hands-on curatorial experience.
During her fellowship, Russell will continue to work on her doctoral dissertation, "The Art of Undeception in the Spanish Golden Age," while contributing to curatorial initiatives at the Meadows. Much of her time will be devoted to studying the still lifes that will inform the final chapter of her dissertation focused on trompe l’oeil.
Sarah Russell is the curator for the Wallach Art Gallery's 2027 exhibition “Engaño: The Art of Illusion in Early Modern Spain”. This exhibition brings together a rich array of seventeenth-century Spanish art from more than 25 U.S. museums, and focuses on the tension between truth and deception in Golden Age Spain. It addresses questions about deceptive illusion—or engaño—that permeated the visual arts as well as religion, philosophy, science, and literature. This pervasive concern was with optical mistakes, the duplicty of other people ,and the failure to perceive transicence of earthly life. While painting and sculpture designed to trick the eye was commonplace across early modern Europe, artistic deceit had a distinct resonance in Spain, animating contemporary discourse, raising questions about the nature of appeareances and reality, truth and illusion.
IMAGE 1: Columbia University Art History PhD candidate Sarah Russell
IMAGE 2: The Meadows Museum holds one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Spanish art outside Spain.
