Upcoming programs

Reminder — last chance to register!
The Decorative Arts Society, Inc. (DAS) is pleased to offer this special event for our contributors. 

A Curator-Led Tour of
Making Home — Smithsonian Design Triennial
at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

on

Wednesday, Feb. 26 at 5:00 p.m. (Eastern time)

Join us for a tour of Making Home — Smithsonian Design Triennial 
with co-curator Christina De León, Cooper Hewitt associate curator of Latino design.

Featuring 25 site-specific, newly commissioned installations, the show explores design’s role in shaping the physical and emotional realities of home across the United States, U.S. Territories, and Tribal Nations. The exhibition is the seventh offering in the museum’s Design Triennial series, which was established in 2000 to address the most urgent topics of the time through the lens of design.

Date: Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2025
 
Time: Be sure to arrive at 4:45 p.m.: the tour will begin promptly at 5 p.m.
  
Location: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum,
2 E. 91st Street, New York City
Meet inside the main entrance. 
  
Cost: Adults, $20 per person
Seniors (age 62+) $14 per person
Cooper Hewitt & Smithsonian members, $0 

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER
Limited to 25 DAS contributors on a first-come, first-served basis.

Contact DAS Board Member Margi Hofer with any questions:
margi.hofer@gmail.com

If you are interested in becoming a DAS contributor, visit this section of our website — http://www.decartssociety.org/support/ — or contact info@decartssociety.org for more information. 

Please note that changes may occur in the program beyond the control of the Decorative Arts Society. The Decorative Arts Society, its officers and its directors, individually and/or otherwise, and cooperating organizations and individuals have no liability or responsibility whatsoever for this event, nor for any acts or omissions of others in connection therewith, and shall in no event be under any liability or responsibility whatsoever for the injury or death of any person or any loss, expense, delay, injury, or other damage to any person or property occurring on, during, or in relation to the event, or any change in the schedule or cancellation of the event. Reservation of a place for the event will constitute acceptance of these terms.

Decorative Arts Society, Inc. presents awards and prize for outstanding contributions to scholarship

The Decorative Arts Society, Inc. (DAS) recognized scholarly works produced in 2023 by presenting its Charles F. Montgomery Prize and Award and Robert C. Smith Award on November 12, 2024, at the Explorer’s Club in New York, NY. Recipients were chosen after careful review of numerous worthy and laudable publications submitted for consideration.

The Charles F. Montgomery Prize is presented to the most distinguished contribution to the study of American decorative arts published in the English language by a North American scholar in a given year. The 2023 recipient, A Dark, a Light, a Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes (New York, NY: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 2023), was produced in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name. It is edited by Susan Brown, associate curator and acting head of textiles at Cooper Hewitt, and Alexa Griffith Winton, Cooper Hewitt’s manager of content and curriculum, with contributions by John Stuart Gordon, Emily M. Orr, Monica Penick, Erica Warren and Leigh Wishner. This groundbreaking publication sheds new light on the story and consequential legacy of textile innovator Dorothy Liebes and her influential studio.

The Charles F. Montgomery Award honors the scholar whose first major publication in the field of North American decorative arts is judged the most outstanding such work published in a given year. The 2023 winner is Embroidering the Landscape: Art, Women and the Environment in British North America, 1740–1770 (London: Lund-Humphries, 2023) by Dr. Andrea Pappas, professor of art and art history at Santa Clara University. Pappas re-examines some of the most iconic needlework from colonial North America: the embroidered landscapes produced in New England in the mid-18th century. She contextualizes the needlework within the broader landscape tradition, revealing how these works communicate women’s knowledge of and engagement with their environment as it was transformed through colonization.

The Robert C. Smith Award recognizes the best article or essay in the field of decorative arts published in English in a given year. The 2023 winning essay is “‘Threads & Clues of it’: Thomas Jefferson’s New York Furniture,” by Diane Ehrenpreis, curator of decorative arts and historic interiors at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, published in American Furniture (Chipstone Foundation, 2023). Beginning with a humble packing list, the article paints a fascinating picture of Jefferson’s New York furnishings. This thoughtfully researched, revelatory essay reminds readers of the performative role furniture can play.

The Smith Award Committee also gave an honorable mention to Edward Cooke, Charles F. Montgomery Professor of American Decorative Arts at Yale University, for his article “Eco-Aesthetics as an Organizing Principle in Global Material Culture: The Example of Green Woodworking,” published in Winterthur Portfolio (Summer/Autumn 2023). This essay encourages readers to question why objects made from wood look the way they do, taking into consideration environmental ethics and the interconnections between humans and nature.

Photos from the awards event and further details about the winning publications and their authors are in the fall 2024 issue of the DAS newsletter. The newsletter is a benefit of being a DAS contributor.

For more information about the awards, see www.decartssociety.org/awards. Suggestions, recommendations or submissions of books and articles published in 2024 to be considered for the 2025 DAS awards can be sent to DAS Publication Awards Chair Medill Harvey at medill.harvey@metmuseum.org or DAS President Amy Dehan at amy.dehan@cincyart.org.

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The Decorative Arts Society, Inc. (DAS) is pleased to offer occasional special events for our contributors.
Watch your mail and this space for announcements of new tours and other events.

If you have any questions, contact DAS Board Member Margi Hofer at
margi.hofer@gmail.com

If you are interested in becoming a DAS contributor, visit the Support section of our website: http://www.decartssociety.org/support/ or contact info@decartssociety.org for more information. 

Decorative Arts Society, Inc.
http://www.decartssociety.org/

Past programs

A Private Tour of the Special Exhibition
Gold in America: Artistry, Memory, Power

Saturday, April 23, 2022, at the Yale University Art Gallery

Led by John Stuart Gordon, Benjamin Attmore Hewitt Curator of American Decorative Arts
For millennia, gold’s glow, resistance to corrosion and rarity have made it a preferred material for objects meant to convey prestige, authority or devotion. Drawing on the Yale University Art Gallery’s holdings of American gold and augmented by paintings, photographs and other works of art, Gold in America: Artistry, Memory, Power was the gallery’s first exhibition since 1963 to survey the role of gold in American art and culture.

The exhibition featured more than 70 examples of gold and related material, with objects spanning more than 400 years, such as early colonial betrothal and mourning rings; a Gilded Age coffee service by Tiffany and Company; rare coins made from ore mined during the Gold Rush; a pair of shoe buckles from the late-18th century reflecting the wealth derived from the slave trade in the Caribbean; and works by contemporary artists who explore the medium’s historical associations, as well as the environmental and human costs of its extraction from the earth.