Displaying items by tag: painted furniture

When: Friday, November 13, 2015 at 1:00 PM EST to Sunday, November 15, 2015 at 1:00 PM EST

Where: Deerfield Community Center, 16 Memorial St., Deerfield, MA 01342

Join Historic Deerfield for an in-depth examination of the decorative arts of New England's inventors, merchants and peddlers during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

When President Adams moved into the new White House in 1800, innovation and adaptation already drove the creative designs of many New England-made objects. Even as elite tastes maintained traditional ties to European styles and materials, the consumer demands of an expanding middle class fueled inventive entrepreneurial approaches to making and selling cheaper American-made attractive goods. At times protected or even encouraged by embargo, war, and westward expansion, New Englanders made and sold a profusion of wares including patent clocks, popular prints, glassware, stoneware, tinware, pewter, cast iron stoves, and stenciled and painted furniture. First competing with and ultimately replacing European manufactures for many families, they infused their products with artistic energy and excitement that spurred a national impulse to "Buy American." Forum speakers and demonstrators will include Peter Benes, Deborah Child, David Jaffee, Amanda Lange, Ned Lazaro, William McMillen, Mary Cheek Mills, Sumpter Priddy, Andrew Raftery, Christine Ritok, and Philip Zea.

It is 1777 and the British Army has just occupied Philadelphia. You are visiting friends outside of the city. You arrive in the black of night. The front door opens and you are expecting to enter a warm home of like-minded patriots. Instead, you see a figure in a brightly colored red uniform casting an ominous shadow in the candle-lit entrance. You turn and run, thinking the Redcoats have reached this safe haven. Only later do you discover you were surprised by a painted wooden object. This is a trick that...

A stunning presentation of American folk art made primarily in rural areas of New England, the Midwest, and the South between 1800 and 1925 opened at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City March 28. "A Shared Legacy: Folk Art in America" celebrates art rooted in personal and cultural identity and made by self-taught or minimally trained artists and artisans. Drawn from the prestigious collection of Barbara L. Gordon, "A Shared Legacy" highlights 63 outstanding examples of American folk art. Vivid portraits, still lifes, and landscapes, as well as distinctive examples of painted furniture from the German American community, carved boxes, sculpture and decorative arts of the highest quality offer an introduction to more than a century of America’s rich and diverse folk art traditions and exemplify the breadth of American creative expression.

The American Folk Art Museum barely avoided extinction last year when it was forced to sell its ill-suited building on West 53rd Street in Manhattan and retreat to its much smaller branch space at 2 Lincoln Square. Now it is modestly spreading it wings and trying to set more of its great collection before the public by collaborating with other institutions.

It has, for example, lent 14 works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its new American Wing galleries. Another fruit of this approach is the exuberant and wide-ranging “Compass: Folk Art in Four Directions,” a dense exhibition of nearly 200 works shoehorned into four galleries in the early-19th-century row houses that are now the home of the South Street Seaport Museum.