Laura Pass Barry and Dennis Carr Join Board of Governors

The Decorative Arts Trust welcomes Laura Pass Barry and Dennis Carr to the Board of Governors.

Laura Pass Barry is the Juli Grainger Senior Curator of paintings, drawings and sculpture at Colonial Williamsburg where she oversees the research, documentation, interpretation, and exhibition of fine, folk, and decorative arts in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, historic area, and the Rockefeller’s Bassett Hall. She holds degrees in Art History and American Studies from the College of Wooster and the College of William and Mary. She has organized numerous exhibitions at the Foundation, most recently including: “I Made This. . .”: Works of Black Artists and Artisans; The Art of Edward Hicks; Artists on the Move: Portraits for a New Nation; We the People: American Folk Portraits; and America’s Folk Art. She is a contributing author to a variety of publications, most notably: The Material World of Eyre Hall: Four Centuries of Chesapeake History; Revolution & Evolution: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum; The Kingdoms of Edward Hicks; and Flying Free: Twentieth-Century Self-Taught Art from the Collection of Ellin and Baron Gordon. She is a current board member for the American Folk Art Society and Americana Insights and past advisory board member of The Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts. Her current projects include research on the Tucker family of Bermuda and a book highlighting the American folk art collections at Colonial Williamsburg. Laura shares that she is “eager to roll up my sleeves to aid in current initiatives and take part in helping to identify new ways the Trust can broaden its impactful work in the decorative arts community.”

Dennis Carr is the Virginia Steele Scott Chief Curator of American Art at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Prior to joining The Huntington in January 2020, he was the Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for 13 years. There, he worked to expand and diversify the collection of American, Latin American, and Native American art and was a co-curator of the award-winning, 53-gallery Art of the Americas Wing in 2010. His exhibitions at the MFA included the critically acclaimed Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia, Cecilia Vicuña: Disappeared Quipu, and Collecting Stories: Native American Art. He contributed to Art and Industry in Early America: Rhode Island Furniture, 1650–1830 (2016) at the Yale University Art Gallery, which won the Charles F. Montgomery Book Prize and the Historic New England Book Prize. He holds graduate degrees in the History of Art at Yale University and the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, and was a 2019 fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership. His projects at The Huntington have included the recent exhibition of the Black modernist sculptor Sargent Claude Johnson; Made in L.A. 2020: a version, the biennial of Los Angeles contemporary art organized with the Hammer Museum; Borderlands, a reinstallation of the Virginia Steele Scott and Lois and Robert F. Erburu Galleries of American Art, and Gee’s Bend: Shared Legacy, as well as an ongoing partnership with Ghetto Film School. Dennis hopes to use his position on the Trust’s Board “to continue to support young curators in the field and to encourage increased interest and diversification of the field of decorative arts.”

The Trust is grateful for the service of Carol Borchert Cadou and J. Thomas Savage, Jr., as their Board terms concluded in December 2024. For more information about the leadership of the Trust, refer to the list of Officers and Governors.