2025 Failey Grants Awarded to Seven Notable Institutions

The Decorative Arts Trust is pleased to offer support through Dean F. Failey Grants to seven outstanding projects in the material culture field, a record number of grantees (and amount of funding) for this impactful program. The competition was fierce, with the number of applications dramatically surpassing even last year’s ground swell of demand.

The Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama will mount the exhibition Silver & Ceremony from Southern Asia, 1850–1910, featuring the Harish K. Patel Collection. The exhibition, on view from June 21 to November 30, 2025, will feature over 150 suites of silver, drawings of silver designs, and other decorative arts that provide a better understanding for the way we live now and the profound debt that we owe to South Asia. This groundbreaking exhibition and companion publication are a testament to the power of Southern Asian silver in the origination, transformation, and consumption of once rarified goods to those taken for granted daily around the world.

Historic Deerfield in Massachusetts will present the exhibition Body by Design: Fashionable Silhouettes from the Ideal to the Real, in their newly renovated Textile Gallery. The exhibition, on view May 2025 to February 2026, will include more than 25 garments ranging from the 18th to the 21st centuries, that exemplify both aspirational and real clothing, and their stories. By exploring the extreme as well as the real in fashions for both men and women over three centuries, the show will shed light on the universal (and ongoing) human desire to shape our bodies in particular ways.

Honolulu Museum of Art (HoMA) will send four Hawaiian quilts to the Balboa Art Conservation Center (BACC) in San Diego for treatment, which will include wet cleaning and spot bleaching. There is no textile conservator in Hawai‘i. From the museum’s holding of more than 30 Hawaiian quilts, the Curator of Textiles and Historic Arts of Hawaiʻi and the Head of Collections have identified four 19th- and early-20th-century works that will respond best to treatment. As HoMA approaches its centenary in 2027, preserving works in and enhancing access to the Arts of Hawaiʻi collection is a key focus.

The Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, PA, will conserve two of the flags included in the exhibition Banners of Liberty. The exhibition, on view from April 19 to August 10, 2025, marks the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the Revolutionary War and the creation of the United States Armed Forces with a special exhibition of original Revolutionary War flags. The flags to be conserved are the Brandywine Flag, carried by Robert Wilson of the Chester County Militia at the 1777 Battle of Brandywine, and the Pulaski Standard, a c. 1778 flag carried by members of Pulaski’s Legion, a combined cavalry and infantry unit of the Continental Army raised by Polish volunteer Casimir Pulaski.

Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, NH, will recreate the wallpaper in the c. 1750 Penhallow House’s living room, stair hallway, and second-floor bedroom for an exhibition centering the life of Geraldine Cousins Palmer (Jeri), who lived at the house from 1937–43 as a child. The exhibition, opening summer 2025, will celebrate the city’s vibrant Black community through the material history and aesthetics of the Cousins family. Period furnishings, personal items, and wallcoverings will illuminate the little-known story of Portsmouth’s working-class Black residents, fostering education and dialogue regarding diversity and inclusion in the community.​

Telfair Museums in Savannah, GA, will present the exhibition The Moss Mystique: Southern Women and Newcomb Pottery, highlighting a group of women artists who found ways to achieve international success within the boundaries of respectability assigned to their class and gender, and who contributed significantly to ideas about regional identity in a transformative period. The summer 2025 exhibition predominantly draws on the collections of the Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University, which holds the largest public collection of Newcomb Pottery and related material. In an adjoining gallery and inspired by the work of the Newcomb potters, Iranian American artist Raheleh Filsoofi will present a bold new installation that combines clay vessels, sound, and video.

Wyck Historic House, Garden, and Farm (Wyck) in the historic Germantown section of Philadelphia, PA, will research, re-interpret, and begin to conserve an understudied Chinese desk with strong links to 19th-century trader Nathan Dunn’s Philadelphia “Chinese Museum.” As well as researching the object’s local and international contexts, Wyck will also consult with conservators on a basic treatment plan to stabilize the object’s deteriorating lacquered surface and reinforce additional structural issues to ensure the object’s safety and longevity. This desk has the potential to illuminate the nuances of cultural and material exchange between Chinese and American traders, Quaker social and material networks, and the politics of collecting and public display in 19th-century Philadelphia.

The Failey Grant program provides support for noteworthy exhibition and object-based conservation projects through the Dean F. Failey Fund, named in honor of the Trust’s late Governor. Applications are due October 31 annually. Sign up for the e-newsletter and follow the Trust on Instagram and Facebook for updates on grant opportunities and announcements. Thank you to the Trust members and donors who help make these grants possible!

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