Recently more than two dozen of the most significant quilts discovered to date by the Massachusetts Quilt Documentation Project went on view at the New England Quilt Museum in Lowell in the exhibition Massachusetts—Our Common Wealth: Quilts from the Massachusetts Quilt Documentation Project, which runs through September 20. So far, some six thousand quilts have been documented as a result …
* At the sale of European furniture and decorative arts at Skinner in Boston on July 11 the top lot was a Wedgwood Queen’s Ware “Frog Service” platter that sold for $54,510 (estimate $10,000-15,000). Other top sales included a pair of 18th century giltwood mirrors that sold for $28,440 (estimate $12,000-18,000), and a collection of late 18th/early 19th century Italian …
July 2009 | After an hour and half of riding and from the top of a small hill we descried ahead of us the splendid buildings of the mission of San Luis Rey, their dazzling whiteness revealed in the first light of day. At that distance and in the uncertain light of dawn, the edifice, of a splendid design and …
July 2009 | Santa Fe is known for its earthy elegance and a carefully tended exoticism. Few people have contributed more visibly to its artistic ambience in recent decades than Nedra Matteucci and her husband, Richard. Their deep affection for the heritage of their home state has resulted in a choice private collection of New Mexican art and antiques formed …
While withholding its authentic treasures for serious seekers, New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment, makes nostalgia bordering on kitsch easily available. Fortunately, when we embarked on our own West by Southwest migration in this issue we had the benefit of some clear-eyed guidance from Laura Beach, who comes from Santa Fe, and Frederick Turner, who has lived there for thirty …
Santa Fe is a city made by hand; a place of no hard edges or sharp departures, whose centuries old past stretches indelibly into the future. Well known from the art it has inspired, the Royal City of the Holy Faith, dedicated to Saint Francis of Assisi, startles first-time visitors. Above the jagged crest of La Bajada to the south, …
July 2009 | How much history lies half-buried beneath the surface of the America we have made? From the first there was a ferocious haste to our patterns of acquisition and settlement, as if the dead past of the Old World we had left behind might catch up with us if we did not instantly shape and then ceaselessly reshape …
“Amy is a treasure,” Linda Eaton, curator of textiles at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, said to me referring to Amy Finkel, the Philadelphia needlework dealer, who recently brought a rare Berlin work picture stitched by a black American schoolgirl to her attention. Knowing that Eaton has long felt that Winterthur’s collection does not adequately represent the cultural diversity that …
July 2009 | For about two generations now, a group of American museums has been exploring the nature and significance of western art. It was exactly fifty years ago, in the dusty but prim and busy town of Cody, Wyoming, near Yellowstone National Park, that the Whitney Gallery of Western Art (sister institution to New York’s Whitney Museum of American …
As one of the most important American portraitists of the twentieth century, Nicolai Fechin is especially revered for his depictions of Native Americans and the New Mexico desert landscape. Of equal merit is the house he built for his family in Taos, New Mexico. A charming combination of styles, it is now home to the Taos Art Museum, and a …