Wrapping up our May/June 2022 issue
“Conformable to that of the Waters”: The search for the origins of an early Kentucky furniture group
The cabriole-legged furniture of
Kentucky is the result of the region’s particular environmental, cultural, social, and economic forces, a kind of terroir, made manifest in wood
Editor’s Letter: January/February 2021
Editor Gregory Cerio welcomes us to the January/February 2021 issue
Bluegrass Treasures: A trio of excerpts from Into the Bluegrass: Art and Artistry of Kentucky’s Historic Icons
A trio of excerpts from a new book that celebrates the art of the early decade of the commonwealth of Kentucky.
New Light: A Window on Mrs. Hackley and Her Greenwood Seminary
“Mahala Jameson marked this sampler under the direction of Mrs Hackley A D 1818.”
A More Perfect Union
How curators interpret figural ceramics from long ago—or, indeed, walls full of portrait paintings—may seem of modest importance, compared to the seismic shifts in public consciousness that have occurred this year. But it’s of such building blocks that a new, egalitarian edifice will be built. It’s a project we will all need to work on, together.
American vernacular rococo
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2013 | About 1736 John Lewis (1678-1762) of Ulster, County Donegal, Ireland, killed his impetuous young landlord, “cleaving in twain his skull,” and then fled to Philadelphia in the American colonies. The following year his wife Margaret Lynn Lewis (1693-1773) and their four sons joined him. Informed that he was still a wanted man, Lewis …
Beyond moonlight and magnolias
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September/October 2012 | “When I met Frank Horton and saw the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in 1976, I put down the Confederate flag and picked up a chair leg. How much better to see the South through its art, to understand its identity through its achievements rather than through the sacrifice of war. Here …
Miniature discoveries
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2012 | The recent appearance of two portrait miniatures leads to new information about backcountry South Carolina artist Isaac Brownfield Alexander. Last year Elle Shushan, a leading expert on portrait miniatures, alerted curators at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) about the pending sale of a rare work by a southern artist-a delightful …
My MESDA
Sometimes you have to move every object in a collection to fully appreciate it. In January the curatorial team at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts did just that. We moved virtually every exhibited object in the museum’s galleries and opened our new 45-minute guided tour, called Southernisms: People and Places, in one week’s time. Exhausted, and with sore …