Modern Echoes of Tradition: Contemporary Expressions in Textiles and Lacquer in Japan
REVIEW: FALL 2025 STUDY TRIP ABROAD
Mexico City: From Ancient Civilizations to Modern Marvels
REVIEW: FALL/WINTER 2025 SOJOURN
“Arts of Fire” at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco
REVIEW: FALL 2025 SYMPOSIUM
Vermont Furniture at Shelburne Museum
REVIEW: SUMMER 2025 SOJOURN
“My Dinner Set from China”: Charles Manigault’s Chinese Export Porcelain
BY CHAD STEWART
In the decades following the American Revolution, Charleston, SC, stood at the cultural, social, and economic center of one of the young nation’s wealthiest regions. The vast resources wielded by the slave-owning planter and merchant classes facilitated the acquisition of expensive, refined objects including splendid furniture, silver, art, and imported Chinese porcelain.
Understanding Wyck’s Chinese Desk
BY GRACE FORD-DIRKS AND CRISTINA FREIRE
For nearly 200 years, a small Chinese writing desk has been the prized and lamented possession of generations of Quaker women in Philadelphia. Today, it sits in the front parlor at Wyck, the ancestral home of nine generations of the Wistar-Haines family in Germantown.
Undercut and Cut Glass “from Below”
BY JOSEPH H. LARNERD
The forthcoming University of Delaware Press publication, “Undercut: Cut Glass in Working-Class Life during the Long Gilded Age,” was supported by a generous Publishing Grant from the Decorative Arts Trust. The book offers a social art history of cut glass—bowls, vases, and other domestic objects incised with geometric patterns against stone and metal wheels—during the medium’s heyday.
Raising the Edge: A Scrutiny of Historic Frames at the Art Gallery of Ontario
BY ERIC BIRKLE
An edge, a border, an ornament, a container—even a fitting—these are various ways in which picture frames have been described, studied, and understood over time. The notion of the frame as a work of art—as either a standalone object or a crucial component of an interdependent whole—is a less familiar concept.
