The Market |
Talking Antiques
July 19, 2010 |Leigh Wishner
Cora Ginsburg
It was a fateful trip to view antique textiles and costumes at Cora Ginsburg in New York that set me on my current path. I went there one afternoon in 2000 with Michele Majer, a professor of mine at the Bard Graduate Center in New York where I was pursuing a master’s degree in the decorative arts of the ancient world and taking courses in textiles (something I did not even realize you could study when I was an art history major at Barnard). Up until that visit I had assumed I would continue at Bard and eventually become an academic, but when I walked
into the gallery and met the owner Titi Halle, I knew this was where I wanted to be. Among other things, the experience was so different from a museum visit, so much more tactile and intimate. I have been with the firm since 2001 getting the kind of experience that is probably not obtainable in a purely academic environment. I completed my master’s degree in clothing and textile history in 2004 while cont…» More
Current & Coming |
The African perspective in Detroit
The Detroit Institute of Arts is presenting a fascinating and adventurous exhibition that explores the consequences on African art of cultural exchanges between Africa and Europe over the past five hundred years. Casting the European as the cultural “other,” a reversal of the usual Eurocentric perspective, the exhibition examines how African artists from diverse cultures used, and continue to use, visual forms to reflect their particular societies’ changing attitudes toward Europeans, as the latter evolved from stranger to colonizer, to the more inclusive Westerner.
On view are a hundred three-dimensional artworks and utilitarian objects executed in wood, ivory, metals, and fabric, drawn from the holdings of the Detroit Institute of Arts and other leading American and international museums and private collections. The show rests on the premise that African perceptions of Europeans over time were neither monolithic nor static, and it demonstrates that cultural exchanges not o…» More
Current & Coming |
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts reopens
April 15, 2010 | 
With an atrium, a forty-foot-high glass wall, new galleries, restaurant, café, and sculpture garden, the reopening of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) on May 1 is the latest in a series of important museum renovations and one of the most anticipated. The 165,000 square-foot expansion, designed by the London-based American architect Rick Mather and the Richmond firm SMBW, is connected to the various other parts of the museum with a series of walkways and surrounds a new sculpture garden designed by the veteran landscape firm Olin Partnership.
In the new wing, the McGlothlin Galleries of American Art will open with an exhibition of promised works from the collection of James W. and Frances G. McGlothlin, including a roll call of American greats—George Bellows, Robert Henri, Winslow Homer, James McNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt, and John Singer Sargent, among others.
Known for its collections of art nouveau and art deco donated by Sydney and Frances Lewis as well as the P…» More
The Scene |
Antiques Week in Philadelphia
April 10, 2010 | 
Philadelphia hosts two important antiques shows in mid-April, and free shuttle service between them makes it easy to see everything on offer. The Twenty-third Street Armory Antiques Show, now in its sixteenth year, opens on Friday April 16 and features more than forty dealers showcasing eighteenth- through twentieth-century American and European fine, folk, and decorative arts. A special exhibition entitled Patriotism: Red, White, and True, drawn from the private collections of exhibiting dealers, will include nineteenth- and twentieth-century objects displaying patriotic symbols.
The gala preview party for the Philadelphia Antiques Show also occurs on April 16. The show itself, celebrating its forty-ninth anniversary this year, runs from April 17 through April 20 at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. It includes fifty dealers, primarily from the Middle Atlantic and New England states, who consistently offer a wide range of formal and folk paintings and decorative arts of the…» More
Current & Coming |
Women and folk art and imperial silver in New York
So many exhibitions open in New York in any given month that it is hard to choose which ones to feature. Two that have great appeal are Women Only: Folk Art by Female Hands, at the American Folk Art Museum, and Vienna Circa 1780: An Imperial Silver Service Rediscovered, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from April 13 to November 7. The former, drawn from the Folk Art Museum’s own collection by curator Stacy C. Hollander, includes paintings, drawings, samplers, quilts, rugs, and other works, most of which were made during the years that young women spent cultivating the skills they would need as wives and mothers, but others demonstrate that women continued to nourish their creative selves by plying those skills throughout their lives.
The show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art reunites many pieces from a magnificent silver service made between about 1779 and 1782 for Duke Albert Casimir of Sachsen-Teschen and his consort, Archduchess Maria Christina of Austria. This …» More
Pickle Dish, American China Manufactory (Bonnin and Morris), Philadelphia, 1771-72. Soft-paste porcelain with lead glaze; height 4 3/16, width 4 1/2
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