Rhode Island gets its due

Editorial StaffExhibitions

Thanks to an active export market that sent its wares to the southern colonies, Canada, and parts of the Caribbean, furniture makers of Rhode Island enjoyed an influence far greater than their industry’s small size. The region’s superlative, and often misattributed, craftsmanship from the colonial and early Federal periods is the focus of a new exhibition, Art and Industry in …

Disruptive influences in Philadelphia

Editorial StaffExhibitions

This fall the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents two exhibitions about art and artistry that upended the cultural apple cart—albeit in vastly different times, places, ways, and contexts.   September 3 saw the debut of Classical Splendor: Painted Furniture for a Grand Philadelphia House—a showcase for a suite of furnishings designed by the architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe and fabricated in …

Meet the Meyers at the Jewish Museum

Editorial StaffExhibitions

By Stephanie L. Herdrich, Metropolitan Museum of Art John Singer Sargent’s Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children, a dazzling display of fin-desiècle opulence and bravura painting, is the focus of a dossier exhibition this fall at New York’s Jewish Museum. The exhibition explores the sitter’s identity and life as a privileged Jew in late Victorian London and affords visitors a …

Of Meissen men…and women at the Frick

Editorial StaffArt, Exhibitions

Vitreous, white, and often delicately translucent, porcelain was invented in China as early as the seventh century, but Western attempts to reproduce the Chinese miracle failed until the dawn of the eighteenth century, when the Saxon ruler Augustus the Strong pressed into his service the young Berlin alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger and commanded him to enrich the Saxon coffers by …

End notes: Welcoming Gregory Cerio

Editorial StaffOpinion

As we say farewell to Betsy Pochoda, who moves on to her next adventures after eight years at the helm of ANTIQUES, we welcome Gregory Cerio as the new editor. A man of wide-ranging interests and well-chosen words, Greg is no stranger to our office, as he was the founding editor of our sister magazine MODERN and has written for …

Dennis Miller, Helen Keller, Bunker

Alexander NemerovArt

The solemn nothings that  fill our everyday life blossom suddenly into bright possibilities  —Helen Keller  Life is such an actual thing —Dennis Miller Bunker Is it just me or is Dennis Miller Bunker’s painting Wild Asters more than beautiful (Fig. 1)? The blue stream rushes under us, grasses bending in the current, and the streamside bushes spray on either bank. …

Local color, global appeal

Chris WaddingtonArt, Exhibitions

Three New Orleans museums and two community cultural institutions draw visitors from afar by keeping the focus on indigenous artistry. Detail of the feathers and beadwork on one of the many ornate Mardi Gras Indian suits on display at the Backstreet Cultural Museum in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans. Photograph courtesy of Meghan Henshaw and the Backstreet Cultural Museum.  Visit …