Editor’s Letter, September/October 2012

Editorial Staff Opinion

Our country’s regional wars may be over, but in the 1960s when the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) began, they were very much alive. Southern writers for instance were still working through the story of loss while northerners remained dubious about the value of southern culture. MESDA took a different path. The idea that the South did not …

Folk art rising

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2012 | Although the American Folk Art Museum received a great deal of press attention upon the closing of its award-winning building on Fifty-Third Street last year, the really big story was to be found in its immediate resurgence. Beginning with the hugely successful red and white quilt show at the Park Avenue Armory and …

In the American Grain: Art and Capital at Crystal Bridges

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2011 | The small town of Bentonville, Arkansas, home to some 35,301 souls in the most recent census, is about to be transformed beyond recognition. Already it enjoys some modicum of renown as the ancestral abode of the Walton fam­ily: its late patriarch, Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, opened his first five and dime here …

Living with antiques: The Juan Jose Prada house

Editorial Staff

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 …

Editor’s letter, July 2009

Editorial Staff

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 …

A Stitch in Time

Glenn Adamson Opinion

Imagine this: you’ve gotten hold of an antique quilt, perhaps 150 years old. It’s in pristine condition. It has an attractive pattern—a classic wedding ring, say, or log cabin, or even a crazy quilt. It is probably not the sort of object a museum would want, but it preserves a rich history all the same, of its maker, the family that retained it, and the craft itself.

Pas Banal: A collection of folk, self-taught, and outsider art

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2013. They met again on a Manhattan bus years after they first knew each other from the Chapin School, where their children were friends. Between them they have five daughters, the youngest then still in college. By 2010 Edward Vermont Blanchard Jr., a financier who serves as president of the American Folk Art Museum board, …