When the curator Denise Murrell talks about Édouard Manet, she races through the details of his life, sometimes abruptly changing course to parse less-discussed aspects of his art — often in disbelief that she’s among the few who have paid attention to these parts of him. After she has so convincingly retold his life story, you can’t help but see what she considers obvious: In his famous 1863 painting “Olympia,” Manet wanted the black maid to stand out.

Revealing that maid’s identity became the foundation of Ms. Murrell’s doctoral dissertation, and the driving force behind her exhibition “Posing Modernity: The Black Model From Manet and Matisse to Today,” currently on view at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University.

[Read the New York Times review of the exhibition.]

Ms. Murrell was working as a business executive when, in 1999, she started taking art history classes. She wasn’t interested simply in identifying black figures in art. She wanted to contextualize their presence, focusing on periods in which the black model remained woefully underexamined.

“During the Renaissance, there is ‘The Adoration of the Magi,’ and there is always an African king,” she said in a recent interview. “I really wanted to understand why that was. Were they imagined images? Were they posed from life? Were the models known?”