Magazine November/December 2024

Don Sparacin

Redefining Americana
Elizabeth Pochoda

The American Renaissance at Yale; Alps exploration and Old Masters of Siena at the Met; Mughal arts and crafts in England; A Parisian changemaker in New York; Magic tricks in Iowa; Stormy weather in California and New York; and Lafayette journeys to Delaware.

Just Desserts: Arthur Liverant is this year’s recipient of the ADA Award of Merit.

Eggs for Kings: Treasured and embellished ostrich eggs litter what is one of the strangest side paths of decorative arts history—as well as one of the oldest. Their market has had its ups and downs over the millennia, but one thing they never are is boring.
Benjamin Davidson and Pippa Biddle

John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities by Bruce Boucher
The Radical Print: Art and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain by Esther Chadwick.

Lalique on the Rise: The master of art nouveau ornamentation gets an airing at Macklowe Gallery in New York, in what is the largest stateside showcase for his jewelry in over twenty-five years.
Jeannine Falino

Sisters in Stitching: An exhibition at the Mississippi Museum of Art sheds new light on the intimate and enduring bonds formed through the quilts sewn by Black women in
the South.
Eleanor H. Gustafson

Over just eight months, the Fenimore Art Museum, with the support of the Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Charitable Trust, expanded its fine art collection with the acquisition of twenty-seven new paintings by American nonpareils.
Cynthia G. Falk, with Paul D’Ambrosio

In the early twentieth century, when monogrammed and monotone white damask ruled the tables of the American upper crust, the parti-colored innovations of Marshal Fry arrived to shake up the scene.
Maggie Lidz

In a radiantly decorated and appointed turn-of-the-century tea house on a Long Island estate, the vision of American artist and Elsie de Wolfe protégé Everett Shinn stands revealed.
Marie Penny

In the nineteenth century Paul Kane’s dignified and captivatingly detailed paintings of Native American life, along with the artist’s
published travelogue from his sojourn across the continent, did much to form Western notions about North America’s original inhabitants. But a four-volume examination by Canadian academic Ian MacLaren digs into the slipshod observational habits and artistic license that mark Kane’s work and limit the reliability of his record.
Margaret Shakespeare

A project already nearly fifty years in the making, the Hassam catalogue raisonné, spearheaded by the president and director of
Hirschl and Adler Galleries, is, we feel, sure to reset scholarly opinion of the American impressionist. As a taste of what’s to come, we present here one of the exhaustively researched entries.
Stuart P. Feld and Kathleen M. Burnside

Emerging during the late Middle Ages, the domestic space known as the estrado kept pace with the ever-increasing reach and buying power of well-to-do households in Spain and the Spanish Americas, becoming a showcase for fineries from the world over. But as a female-coded area, it provided women a degree of autonomy and self-expression not generally possible in Continental or colonial society of the time.
Naomi Slipp