NEW RESEARCH
In addition to the Decorative Arts Trust’s support of scholarship through the Emerging Scholars Program, we eagerly promote the research, exhibitions, and projects undertaken by colleagues at museums around the country in our member magazine, The Magazine of the Decorative Arts Trust. We invite you to enjoy the online versions of magazine articles featured below.
See more stories about recent research in The Decorative Arts Trust Bulletin.
Understanding Craft: A New Digital Tool Debuts
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.
Painted Walls: New Virtual Museum Offers an Immersive Experience
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.
Seafaring Portraits in Bermuda and the Atlantic Basin
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.
Multi-Sensorial Materials: Egyptomania and the Decorative Impulse
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.
French Interiors for an American Gilded Age
BY LAURA C. JENKINS
From the early 1880s onward, the movement of French 18th-century decorative arts from Europe to New York coincided with a growing fashion among the wealthy of that city for rooms in French historical styles.
18th-Century Marine Imagery in the Sèvres Archive
BY ALYSE MULLER
A Decorative Arts Trust Research Grant provided the opportunity to conduct essential research at the Sèvres manufactory archive in Paris. My dissertation reconsiders the marine genre within a variety of mediums to explore the nexus of maritime commerce, political aspirations, iconography, and aesthetics.
Jean and Zohmah Charlot’s House: A Modernist Space Referencing Enduring Cultural Traditions
BY OLIVIA ARMANDROFF
Located in Honolulu’s Kāhala neighborhood, in close proximity to the shoreline, Jean and Zohmah Charlot’s house has a modest footprint and understated design that speak to a different era.
The Material World of the Spanish Colonial Estrado
BY JORGE F. RIVAS PÉREZ
Sometimes a separate room or a sectioned-off portion of a reception room, the estrado was the most important feminine space in elite Spanish homes.
Completing the Picture: New Research into Craft, Slavery, and Servitude in Early Lancaster
BY BETHANY MCGLYN
The “Completing the Picture: Slavery and Servitude in Early Lancaster County” initiative seeks to research and reinterpret objects and spaces at Historic Rock Ford and the John J. Snyder Jr. Gallery of Early Lancaster Decorative Arts in order to more fully explore the complex histories of those who made and used them.
Made for Use: The Pottery of C.A. Haun
BY RILEY KATE RICHARDS
Christopher Alexander Haun produced uniquely decorated utilitarian earthenware pottery until his death in 1861 and is currently a semi-canonical figure in the study of Tennessee decorative arts.