Latest Information and News

  • After retiring from teaching at SMU. AC has continued publishing, curating exhibitions, and lecturing around the country and abroad. But she has also found an exciting new profession: writing art history and music history murder mystery books. The first seven of the Megan Crespi Novels are: Killing for Klimt, The Schiele Slaughters, The Kokoschka Capers, The Munch Murders, The Kollwitz Calamities (at last, a woman!), The Kandinsky Conundrum, and The Mahler Mayhem. AC is now at work on her 8th Krimi: The Beethoven Boomerang, a novel that takes her to Bonn in June. After research there she will continue on to Vienna where she has been asked to give two lectures at the new Krems Museum. 9 “Krimis” are out: “Krimis in the Megan Crespi novel series are” Killing for Klimt, The Schiele Slaughters, The Kokoschka Capers, The Munch Murders, and The Kollwitz Calamities are now out in paperback and on EBook. The books, along with her Egon Schiele‘s Portraits and The Changing Image of Beethoven, are published by Sunstone Press of Santa Fe and are available on Amazon.
  • At 10am on Friday, April 5 at the United Methodist Church on the SMU campus AC will be speaking about her seven novels in the Megan Crespi Murder Mystery Series. This includes her latest one, The Mahler Mayhem.
  • In January of 2019 SMU hosted a gala event in the Meadows Museum to announce the establishment of a fellowship in AC‘s name for Ph.D students whose thesis work requires study abroad. AC delivered a lecture titled “I Have That Which I Have Given.”
  • AC was flown to Vienna in April of 2017 to “star” in two documentaries about her discovery of Egon Schiele‘s cell in the small town of Neulengbach. She was flown back in April 2018 for the opening of a Schiele museum in his birth town of Tulln. (She also spoke at Franklin University in Lugano.)
  • Over the years AC has given the DMA several important gifts: Self-Portrait Drawing Klimt by Egon Schiele, a Bohemian Ware porcelain, some 35 graphics by German and French artists of the last century, and now Rosa Bonheur‘s oil painting of a ewe in a meadow. The little sheep is beautifully installed.
  • This makes the second medal of honor AC has received; the first was in 1991 from the Republic of Austria “for services rendered to the Republic.”
  • AC‘s alma mater (class of 1956), Barnard College,presented her with its “Distinguished Alumna Award” in New York. AC‘s mother, Megan Laird, also attended Barnard (class of 1929). AC recently gave Barnard her 1840 marble medallion portrait by Margaret Foley of the grandmother of T. S. Eliot.