Six Recipients Receive 2026 Publishing Grants

by Emily Serpico   

The Decorative Arts Trust is thrilled to announce the six recipients of our 2026 Publishing Grants. The Anchorage Museum in Anchorage, AK; the Museum of Old Newbury in Newburyport, MA; the New Bedford Whaling Museum in New Bedford, MA; and the Textile Society of America headquartered in Millersville, MD, received Publishing Grants under the Collections, Exhibitions, and Conferences category. Dr. Catalina Ospina and Dr. Kayli R. Rideout received Publishing Grants for First-Time Authors.

The Anchorage Museum’s publication Arctic Interiors: Exploration, Imagery, and the Decorative Imagination of the North will trace how images of Arctic landscapes, peoples, and wildlife entered decorative interiors, from 19th‑century scenic wallpaper (figure 1) to natural history illustration and modern surface design. To be published next fall, the book will follow the circulation of Arctic imagery through expedition accounts, printed visual culture, and the work of naturalists like Henry Wood Elliott, whose widely reproduced images shaped a recognizable visual vocabulary. Grounded in research tied to the Museum’s collection, the study links historic decorative imagery with contemporary Arctic design practices, reframing the region’s role in the decorative imagination and advancing the museum’s interpretation of related art and material culture. 

Simple Elegance: 200 Years of Crafting Silver in Newburyport will offer a concise history of Newburyport’s silver industry and its significance to the city’s economic and cultural development from the mid‑18th to early 20th centuries. Situating Newburyport within New England’s evolving economy, the book examines silver as both a skilled craft and a marker of trade, status, and regional identity. Centering on objects in the Museum of Old Newbury’s collection (figure 2), the publication will highlight how design and craftsmanship reflected local traditions and broader stylistic influences. New photography and updated research refine the record of Newburyport silversmiths, deepening the understanding of a formative regional industry.

The New Bedford Whaling Museum’s A Guide to the Collection will introduce the institution’s wide‑ranging holdings, now numbering more than one million objects. Founded in 1903 to preserve the history of New Bedford and the southern coast of Massachusetts, the Museum’s collection spans American and European art and material culture (figure 3), global whaling history, regional industries, Japanese works on paper, natural history, Indigenous material culture, and early printed books. The Guide, which is scheduled for a January 2027 release, will feature over 350 objects with new photography and interpretation that reflect interdisciplinary curatorial approaches. Presenting many works never before published, this volume will serve as the Museum’s first comprehensive collections catalogue and fill a major scholarly gap.

In November 2027, the Textile Society of America will publish Material Memory, Futures, and Renewal: Proceedings of the Textile Society of America Colloquia, 2022–2026. Covering the examination of historical and contemporary textile practices (figure 4), the volume will include up to 25 essays and 7 shorter contributions that collectively address gaps in representation, geography, and authorship. An open-access companion digital volume will make all entries available through the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Digital Commons. The selected essays will explore a broad range of topics, including artisanal knowledge, disability justice, diasporic memory, and the roles of education and publishing, thereby advancing inclusive, interdisciplinary scholarship in textiles and material culture.

Dr. Catalina Ospina, Assistant Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, will offer the first comprehensive art historical study of objects decorated with mopa mopa resin (figure 5), an Indigenous material from the Northern Andes, in From Mouth to Hand: Mopa Mopa Resin in the Colonial Andes. During the Spanish colonial period, artisans in what is now southwestern Colombia transformed a plant resin into vivid embellishment for domestic objects. The material was pigmented, stretched into thin sheets, and cut into intricate motifs. Blending Prehispanic, European, and Asian aesthetics, these works circulated widely yet remain understudied and often misidentified. To be published through the University of Texas Press in June 2027, the book will draw upon extensive research to reconstruct this corpus, foreground Indigenous makers’ creativity, examine historical erasures, and trace Andean–Amazonian connections that expand colonial and material culture studies.

Louis Comfort Tiffany is celebrated for his artistic brilliance, yet his work is often framed within Gilded Age luxury, obscuring its entanglement with the social and political realities of his time. Dr. Kayli Rideout, Hugh F. McKean Curator for the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, will reframe this narrative in Fragile: Louis C. Tiffany and the Lost Cause in Glass. She examines Tiffany’s 19 stained‑glass Confederate memorial windows (figure 6), created between 1890 and 1925 across five Southern sites, as products of the Jim Crow era and representations of Lost Cause visual culture. To be published through the University of Virginia Press in 2027, Fragile situates these understudied works within histories of racial violence, memory‑making, and public commemoration to reveal how these largely overlooked windows continue to shape cultural memory today.

We look forward to seeing these publications come to fruition over the next few years! The deadline for the next round of Publishing Grants is March 31, 2027.

Emily Serpico is the Membership and Grants Coordinator at the Decorative Arts Trust.