New Members for the Trust’s Board of Governors

The Board of Governors of the Decorative Arts Trust has played a leading role in the development of this organization over the past 40 years, and their leadership ensures its continued success. We have enjoyed the privilege of welcoming five new members over the past year.

Mary Raines

Mary E. Raines: Mary is a graduate of the College of William and Mary and Emory University Law School. She practiced law in Atlanta as an in-house attorney for Delta Air Lines for 25 years prior to her retirement in 2005. While in Atlanta, she served as President of the Friends of Decorative Arts at the High Museum. She currently resides in Savannah, GA, where she is Vice President of the Friends of the Owens Thomas House of the Telfair Museum and serves on the Telfair’s Collections Committee. She also served a term on the City of Savannah’s Cultural Affairs Commission. Mary has attended Trust symposia and international tours for many years and also participated in the Winterthur Institute program in 2015.

Tara Cederholm

Tara Cederholm: Tara is a graduate of Middlebury College and Boston University, where she received her MA in Art History with an emphasis on American furniture and decorative arts. Tara worked at Skinner Auctions and the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities before becoming the steward of a private collection focused on American furniture and decorative arts as well and Chinese furniture, ceramics, and related decorative arts. She is also the Curator and Vice President of the Brookfield Arts Foundation, a private operating foundation which acquires and lends art works to various museums. Tara is a noted scholar, author, and speaker on topics of American, English, and Chinese furniture history and is currently leading an ongoing investigation of the art of japanning in 18th-century Boston. She joined the Decorative Arts Trust in 2000 and currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the Concord Museum.

James “Hornor” Davis

James Hornor Davis, IV: Hornor is the Chairman of Dingess-Rum Properties, Inc., a landholding and investment company in West Virginia. He previously served as the executive director of Sunrise Museums in Charleston, WV, and also practiced property and corporate law. He holds a BA in architectural history from the University of Virginia and a JD from the West Virginia University College of Law. A native of West Virginia with strong ties to Rhode Island and South Carolina, Hornor recently relocated to Mt. Desert, ME. He is involved with numerous boards and advisory committees focused on the humanities, arts, and philanthropy, and is an active and long-term member of the Decorative Arts Trust.

Nicholas Vincent

Nicholas C. Vincent: Nick is the Manager of Collection Planning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where, on behalf of the Deputy Director, he provides strategic direction and general oversight for collections management, art storage, and gallery projects across the institution. From 2007 to 2014, Nick served as a Research Associate in the Met’s American Wing, assisting with the comprehensive renovation of the Met’s American art galleries, supervising the installation of the ca. 1882 Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room, and co-curating the special exhibition “Artistic Furniture of the Gilded Age.” Nick is a graduate of the Attingham Summer School program and holds a BA from Wesleyan University (CT), a MA in the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, and MA in arts administration from NYU. Nick received a Dewey Lee Curtis scholarship to attend the Trust’s 2007 symposium in Pittsburgh.

Carolyn McNamara

Carolyn McNamara is a strong advocate for the decorative arts and experiential learning for the next generation of scholars. She and her husband Mike are avid collectors of Southern furniture and 18th-century Virginia and North Carolina maps. Members of the Trust since 2012, they recently endowed the Trust’s Young Scholar Lecture program during Colonial Williamsburg’s Antiques Forum. Carolyn and Mike have participated in several Study Trips Abroad. A retired Administrator for the Heart Center of the Medical College of Virginia Hospitals at Virginia Commonwealth University, Carolyn now enjoys volunteering her time for Colonial Williamsburg and the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts. She is a member of Williamsburg’s Art Museums Advisory Board, the Friends of Collections, and the Raleigh Tavern Society. Carolyn has served two terms on the MESDA Advisory Board and is an enthusiastic supporter of their Summer Institute Scholarship Program. Carolyn and Mike, along with their dog Ziva, live in Williamsburg, and enjoy introducing their three grandchildren to history and the decorative arts.