Preservation: The Stanton-Davis homestead

Editorial Staff Magazine, Opinion

By Katrine Ames Here in this shell of a house, This house that is struggling to be, Hope must have been The first to move in, And waited to welcome me. But hope isn’t easy to see. This lovely tribute to the White House in Leonard Bernstein and Allan Jay Lerner’s 1976 musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would make a perfect anthem for …

A Romanov Dynasty Celebration

Editorial Staff Art

By Cynthia A. Drayton Mikhail Romanov was crowned Czar in 1613. The Romanov family then ruled Russia for the next three hundred years until the 1917 assassination of Nicholas II. To mark the four hundredth anniversary of the Romanov’s ascension to the throne and the family’s patronage of both Fabergé and the decorative arts, there are exhibitions, an auction, and …

Current & Coming, January-March

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

For sheer variety of form, color, period, and place of origin it is difficult to match the offerings at the annual New York Ceramics Fair, where thirty-three tightly packed booths represent virtually everything in the world of fired clay-from purely utilitarian objects to those meant solely for aesthetic contemplation. Most of the dealers are from the United States, though there …

Last Chance: Shows Closing this Weekend

Editorial Staff Calendar

Last Chance: Shows Closing this Weekend   Connecticut New Britain New Britain Museum of American Art: “Courier & Ives: Impressions of America”; to April 15   Florida West Palm Beach Norton Museum of Art: “Cocktail culture”; to April 15   Georgia Athens Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia: “To Make a world: George Ault and 1940s America”; to April …

Jewels and Gems in Boston

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

Brooch designed by John Paul Cooper (1869-1933), English, 1908. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; gift of Susan B. Kaplan. Jewels and more jewels are to be found in the new Rita J. and Stanley H. Kaplan Family Foundation Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which opens on July 19. Jewels, Gems, and Treasures: Ancient to Modern, the inaugural …

Edward Hopper

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

Of Edward Hopper shows there is no evident end and that is not a bad thing. This summer the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine, is opening a massive Hopper show on a small Hopper theme-the artist’s oil sketches, paintings, water­colors, drawings, and etchings from his nine summers in Maine between 1914 and 1929. Some forty-five works in …

Williamsburg Forum 2011

Editorial Staff Calendar

Colonial Williamsburg will convene its sixty-third annual Antiques Forum between February 20 and 24, 2011. The theme this year, Decorative Arts Forensics: How We Know What We Know, is intended to shed light on some of the fascinating advances in techniques for historical research and scientific investigation that have opened new avenues of verification for curators, collectors, and scholars. The …

Fantastic Mr. Shearer

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

Fantastic Mr. Shearer A man with a mission, the elusive late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Virginia cabinetmaker John Shearer often professed his British loyalties in carving and inlay. Even when he did not, his furniture displays an idiosyncratic style that has long intrigued scholars and collectors-and made Shearer the subject of two articles in our April-May 2010 issue, written in …

The African perspective in Detroit

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

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, …

Women and folk art and imperial silver in New York

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

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 …