Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank

About Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank

Dr. Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank is the Contributing Editor for Latin American Colonial and Native American/First Nations art. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of California Los Angeles. Much of her research focuses on religious art in New Spain, emotions, women in art, and digital art history. In 2013, she received a Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Fellowship for Excellence in Teaching at Brooklyn College, CUNY, where she was an Assistant Professor of Art History until 2015. She was a tenured Associate Professor of Art History at Pepperdine University from 2015–2020. Now, she has joined Smarthistory as the Dean of Content and Strategy.

Detail, Alejo Fernández, Virgin of the Navigators, 1531–36, Seville, Alcazar
If we read Alejo Fernández's The Virgin of the Navigators closely, we can learn an enormous amount about Spain’s role in exploration, trade and commerce, conquest and colonization, and slavery.

Alejo Fernández, The Virgin of the Navigators

The Iberian Peninsula was a dynamic place in the fourteenth century, with artists from what is today France and Italy arriving in the area, as well as Catalan artists traveling elsewhere.

Ferrer Bassa and the murals of Pedralbes

Francis had great reason to emphasize his wealth and magnanimity. For years he had been at war with the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, a gamble that continued to go poorly for the French king.

The Gallery of Francis I at Fontainebleau ...

Renaissance author Leon Battista Alberti's ideas about what makes for a good painting would have a lasting influence on the history of art.

Alberti’s revolution in painting