NEW RESEARCH

BY LIVY SCOTT

I have spent the last year as the Peggy N. Gerry Curatorial Fellow at The Trustees of Reservations (The Trustees) working at the Colonel John Ashley House. In this two-year fellowship, my role entails cataloging the house’s collection, reinterpreting its historic interiors for a new furnishing plan, and conducting new scholarly research.

BY DANIELLE ZHANG

The boundary between vernacular and literati art seemed to change in Late Imperial China (1368–1912). Instead of concentrating on imagery and motifs, some creative and talented vernacular craftspeople started to incorporate themes that belonged to literati.

BY MATTHEW E. MONK

At Berea College in central Kentucky, I worked alongside staff and students and explored material and archival collections. My research, centered on the evolution of craft education at Berea, offered a fascinating window into the ways the institution has both shaped and been shaped by broader societal currents, particularly those affecting the Appalachian region.

BY EMILY ZAIDEN

Three years in the making, Craft in America is launching the first ever Craft Video Dictionary, thanks to support from the Decorative Arts Trust’s inaugural Prize for Excellence and Innovation. The free online resource gives the public direct, close-up views of the craft processes and techniques behind the decorative arts.

BY MARGARET GAERTNER AND KATHLEEN CRISCITIELLO

The Center for Painted Wall Preservation (CPWP) is dedicated to the research and preservation of 18th- and 19th-century American paint-decorated plaster walls. As part of its mission to document and encourage appreciation of this vulnerable and increasingly rare art form, CPWP identified 40 of the best surviving examples in New England and upstate New York and commissioned photographer Michael Wasserman to photograph and digitally scan 20 of these interiors.

BY DAMIËT SCHNEEWEISZ

Miniatures have long held a great capacity for circum-oceanic movement and engagement. In museum collections, these small portrait-objects have straddled the worlds of decorative and fine art and jewelry. They are difficult to categorize, often painted on sheets of vellum or ivory with watercolors and set with hairwork in oft-bedazzled lockets that could be worn or carried on the body.

BY LEA C. STEPHENSON

Across the late-19th-CENTURY Anglophone world, artists and collectors fabricated Orientalist fantasies of Egypt as part of a phenomenon that became known as Egyptomania. This sensation included an embodied and material engagement with the modern North African Middle East and the ancient Islamic empire.