Past Lecture Is it McIntire? Furniture Carving in Federal Salem March 13, 2010

Cleveland:  American Furniture Collectors Lecture March 13, 2010

Title: Is it McIntire? Furniture Carving in Federal Salem

This lecture will explore the rich tradtion of ornamental carving in Salem and the role Samuel McIntire played in creating a distinct regional style in both architecture and furniture.

Dean Thomas Lahikainen is a native of Massachusetts and a graduate of Syracuse University where he earned a Masters Degree in American art history. He served as Curator and Director of Museums and Public Programs at the Essex Institute before becoming the Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of American Decorative Art at the Peabody Essex Museum in 1992. He has lectured throughout the United States and Australia and organized numerous exhibitions, including: Frank Benson American Impressionist; Luxury & Innovation: The Furniture Masterworks of John & Thomas Seymour; and most recently Samuel McIntire Carving an American Style. He is the author of numerous articles and exhibition catalogues; his most recent book on Samuel McIntire won The Historic New England Book Prize in 2008. An authority on early American interiors, he has also served as an advisor and consultant for the interpretation and restoration of seventeen historic buildings in Massachusetts.

Jennifer L. Anderson will speak on her book "Mahogany" at the Hunt Club in Chagrin Falls on September 13, 2014 - if interested please contact Joe Peter at 216-702-5314 for reservations.

Ms. Anderson is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY).  Jennifer has an MA from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture and a PhD in Atlantic and Early American History from New York University. She is the author of Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America (Harvard Univ. Press, 2012) about the social and environmental history of the tropical timber trade in the 18th century. She has received many awards and fellowships, including the Society of American Historians’ Nevins Prize for Best-Written dissertation. She headed the research team for the Emmy-nominated documentary, “Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North,” about the Northern slave trade and in 2013 curated an exhibition at NYU about Sylvester Manor, a 17th committed to public history, she has served as a historical consultant at numerous historic sites and museums.

By the 1760s, imported mahogany was all the rage for fine furniture in colonial America. As these coveted trees were quickly depleted in much of their native Caribbean range, however, the mahogany trade became an increasingly risky and competitive business. Nevertheless, many New England merchants, sea captains, and cabinetmakers—eager to profit from this desirable wood—took their chances in this new line of trade. In her talk, “From Rainforest to Parlor: The Mahogany Trade in Colonial New England”, Prof. Jennifer Anderson will discuss some highlights of her research into the adventures (and misadventures) of these various participants and their quest to secure this precious material.  A brief synopsis her book: “In the mid-eighteenth century, colonial Americans became enamored with the rich colors and silky surface of mahogany. This exotic wood, imported from the West Indies and Central America, quickly displaced local furniture woods as the height of fashion. Over the next century, consumer demand for mahogany set in motion elaborate schemes to secure the trees and transform their rough-hewn logs into exquisite objects. But beneath the polished gleam of this furniture lies a darker, hidden story of human and environmental exploitation.

Mahogany traces the path of this wood through many hands, from source to sale: from the enslaved African woodcutters, including skilled “huntsmen” who located the elusive trees amidst dense rainforest, to the ship captains, merchants, and timber dealers who scrambled after the best logs, to the skilled cabinetmakers who crafted the wood, and with it the tastes and aspirations of their diverse clientele. As the trees became scarce, however, the search for new sources led to expanded slave labor, vicious competition, and intense international conflicts over this diminishing natural resource. When nineteenth-century American furniture makers turned to other materials, surviving mahogany objects were revalued as antiques evocative of the Jennifer Anderson offers a dynamic portrait of the many players, locales, and motivations that drove the voracious quest for mahogany to adorn American parlors and dining rooms. This complex story reveals the cultural, economic, and environmental costs of America’s growing self-confidence and how desire shaped not only the natural world but people's lives.

Past Speaker Diane C. Wachs Specialist in American and European Arts

Diane C. Wachs

Diane C. Wachs is a specialist in American and European Decorative Arts of the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  A graduate of Trinity College, Washington, DC, and the Cooper-Hewett National Design Museum’s History of Decorative Arts Masters’ Program, in New York, New York.

In graduate school, Ms. Wachs spend two months in North Carolina at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, or M.E.S.D.A. It was there she developed an interest in things Southern, and in particular, Kentucky furniture.

As the Director of the Headley-Whitney Museum, Lexington, KY., from 1994-2001, she curated and mounted exhibitions on American and European furniture, Kentucky furniture and regional material culture.  She has spoken extensively and published on Kentucky furniture. From 2001 until 2006, Wachs was also an adjunct professor, teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of architecture and decorative art at the University of Kentucky’s College of Design.

At Cowan Auctions, in Cincinnati, Ohio, Ms. Wachs is the Director of the Fine and Decorative Art Department, overseeing three major auctions a year and thirteen minor ones. Together with the support of four outstanding specialists in American and European paintings and portraiture, silver, porcelain, furniture and art glass, she is responsible for the material in the sale, production of the sale and printed catalogues, and treatment and care of consignors in the sale.

Please join members of the American Furniture Collectors on Saturday, October 13 to hear

Diane Wachs speak on “Regionalism in Furniture of the Old South”.

Your Steering Committee

 Diane C. Wachs

Diane C. Wachs is a specialist in American and European Decorative Arts of the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  A graduate of Trinity College, Washington, DC, and the Cooper-Hewett National Design Museum’s History of Decorative Arts Masters’ Program, in New York, New York.

In graduate school, Ms. Wachs spend two months in North Carolina at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, or M.E.S.D.A. It was there she developed an interest in things Southern, and in particular, Kentucky furniture.

As the Director of the Headley-Whitney Museum, Lexington, KY., from 1994-2001, she curated and mounted exhibitions on American and European furniture, Kentucky furniture and regional material culture.  She has spoken extensively and published on Kentucky furniture. From 2001 until 2006, Wachs was also an adjunct professor, teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of architecture and decorative art at the University of Kentucky’s College of Design.

At Cowan Auctions, in Cincinnati, Ohio, Ms. Wachs is the Director of the Fine and Decorative Art Department, overseeing three major auctions a year and thirteen minor ones. Together with the support of four outstanding specialists in American and European paintings and portraiture, silver, porcelain, furniture and art glass, she is responsible for the material in the sale, production of the sale and printed catalogues, and treatment and care of consignors in the sale.

Please join members of the American Furniture Collectors on Saturday, October 13 to hear

Diane Wachs speak on “Regionalism in Furniture of the Old South”.

Your Steering Committee

Past Speaker Andrew Richmond Vice President Garth's Auction

Andrew Richmond

Mr. Richmond is Vice-president, Garth’s Auctions, Ohio. A native Ohioan, Andrew Richmond received his bachelor’s degree in history from Kenyon College and his master’s degree from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture. His research has focused on the furniture of early Ohio and the Midwest, and he has published articles in American Furniture and The Magazine Antiques; his current research focuses on the heretofore unknown Marietta, Ohio, cabinetmaker Joshua Shipman and the early furniture of the Midwestern Germans. He has lectured widely on Ohio furniture, including at the 2006 Colonial Williamsburg Antiques Forum and the 2007 Furniture Forum at the Winterthur Museum. Richmond has been in the auction business since 2003, and at Garth’s since 2006. He serves as a licensed auctioneer and certified appraiser. Along with his wife, Hollie Davis, he writes a monthly column for Maine Antique Digest titled “The Young Collector.” Most recently, Andrew has served as guest curator for Equal in Goodness, an exhibition of Ohio decorative arts at the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio in Lancaster. 

About his talk

                 
During the nineteenth century, the sound of German being spoken was a common occurrence in the American Midwest.  Germanic communities dotted the countryside, the residents making and using distinctive styles of furniture.  In reality, to call them "Germans" is incorrect, though most spoke various dialects of German. Throughout the nineteenth century, thousands of immigrants left their homes in Germany, Switzerland, and Alsace (northwestern France) and came to America, bypassing the populated Eastern seaboard, and choosing, instead, to settle in the agrarian heartland.  They established communities like Zoar, Sonnenburg, and Pandora in Ohio, Oldenburg in Indiana, and further west into Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas, and as far north as Wisconsin.

Others came from existing Germanic communities in the Eastern United States, particularly Pennsylvania, and came west where land was cheap and fertile. Many of these folks were Mennonites and left places like Soap Hollow for places like Holmes County, Ohio, Elkhart and LaGrange Counties in Indiana, and Kent County, Michigan.

Along with their language, these immigrants brought with them a rich cultural tradition in the form of a furniture style that was often heavy and architectural, sometimes simple and elegant, and often vibrantly painted. Principally because of their language, the communities that these immigrants formed often remained isolated from mainstream American society. As a result, they continued to produce furniture in styles that had long fallen out of fashion elsewhere.

Past speaker Ethan W. Lasser Margaret S. Winthrop Associate Curator at the Harvard Art Museums

ETHAN W. LASSER

Ethan W. Lasser is the Margaret S. Winthrop Associate Curator at the Harvard Art Museums.  Prior to his Harvard appointment Dr. Lasser was Curator of the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee.  In 2008 Lasser earned his Ph.D. in the History of Art at Yale University.  He has curated numerous exhibitions of early American decorative arts and contemporary craft.  His most recent show, The Tool at Hand considers the relationship between artists and their tools.  Dr. Lasser also teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

What is the place of American Art in the 21^st – century museum?  This talk will discuss three recent exhibitions at the Chipstone Foundation Object Lab in Milwaukee that address this question.  These projects bring an interdisciplinary lense to the study of historic images and artifacts, and rethink some of the dominant paradigms and master narratives of American Art history.

This meeting is being held in conjunction with MAC and American Furniture Collectors of the Western Reserve Historical Society. Please join fellow WRHS members on February 9 as we look forward to exploring with you this interesting approach to our favorite objects. We encourage you to bring friends and interested potential members to this exceptional speaker.