Becca Lo Presti and Taylor Rossini Lecture at Winterthur’s DE Antiques Show

As the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library’s Delaware Antiques Show celebrates its 60th anniversary in 2023, the Decorative Arts Trust is proud to once again sponsor two young scholar lectures. 

At 3:00 pm on Saturday, November 11, Becca Lo Presti and Taylor Rossini, both Lois F. McNeill Fellows in the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, take the stage to share recent research with fellow decorative arts enthusiasts.

In her lecture The Last Tall Clock in America? A Winterthur Tall Clock and Time Telling in Nineteenth-Century America, Becca Lo Presti analyzes a mid-Atlantic tall clock at Winterthur, exploring the nuances of time telling in the United States. Although the production of tall clocks decreased as the century progressed, these objects remained present in both material and imagined spaces of American life. The tall clock’s enduring presence subsequently reveals how the right to regulate one’s time varied drastically depending on race, class, and gender despite increasing access to time-telling pieces. Becca completed her undergraduate studies at Hofstra University.

Taylor Rossini’s lecture, Empire on a Plate: Imperial Rivalry and Cartographic Knowledge in Overton’s Trading Part of the West Indies (1741), explores the role of cartographic representation in the staging of 18th-century empire through a British map created during the War of Jenkins Ear (1739–48). The map, published in an unstable wartime moment, offers an optimistic and somewhat counterfactual view of British naval power in the Americas, providing a compelling opportunity to reflect on how material props are entangled with imperial aspirations. Taylor received her undergraduate degree from Middlebury College in Vermont.

Read essays from these lecturers in the Show’s digital program (pages 10-15). To learn more about the Decorative Arts Trust’s lecture sponsorships, see our Emerging Scholars Program information.