For more than a year, the museum has been sans decorative arts curator. Largely due to budget cuts, the museum lacked the resources to hire a curator until recently, when it could once again fill the position due to a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The NEA uses the Recovery and Reinvestment Act to preserve jobs in the nonprofit arts sector by providing salary support for positions deemed critical to an organization’s artistic mission. We are happy to welcome decorative arts curator Dale Couch to our staff! Couch will work half time for the next two years. He holds a bachelor’s degree in history and a graduate degree in art history from the University of South Carolina. He is also a graduate of the Archives Institute at Emory University and the Institute for Southern Material Culture at the University of North Carolina and Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts. Couch completed additional graduate course work at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Previously, he was a senior reference archivist at the Georgia Archives, where he researched and consulted for exhibitions at the High Museum of Art, the Atlanta Historical Society and many other regional institutions.
Couch comes to GMOA with energy and plans, ready to invigorate the decorative arts department once more. Before his arrival, the curatorial work associated with the position was dispersed throughout the office, adding extra work to the pre-existing sizable load on the desks of the rest of the staff: the publication of papers from the Fourth Henry D. Green Symposium of the Decorative Arts was compiled, edited and (will soon be) published, decorative arts-centered talks and exhibitions were being organized, the fifth edition of the symposium (to be held in January 2010) was being put together and administrative hurdles still had to be jumped. Now, however, with the workload stress assuaged and the artistic direction manned, the museum finally relaxes and awaits, with anticipation, the outcome of the new projects being devised in the decorative arts department.
To our amusement, as if by serendipity or cosmic irony, our new curator’s name fits his position perfectly. His work here will no doubt be of great interest, judging by his prolific résumé and interesting past. Most important, Couch is a decorative arts curator with an exceptionally diverse scholarly, academic and personal background. He employs cultural history as a tool with which to frame research questions and determine where settlers in Georgia originated. In essence, he magnifies the socio-anthropological aspects of artistic history, pairing migration patterns, colonial records, folk art and folk tales with aesthetics to reach a better understanding of furniture.
The decorative arts are not quite like the visual arts, he says. They streamline aestheticism in favor of functionality. Decorative arts, he continues, express an aesthetic dimension that utilitarian objects acquire as a testament of an art we are living. Couch’s rich understanding of the decorative arts is not strictly academic; his knowledge of the South extends to his memories of growing up in a traditional southern setting. His interest in furniture kindled when—in South Carolina, where his family has lived since the 1600s—he would visit early houses. His fascination with the historical, anthropological and artistic aspects of the southern colonial furniture he saw firsthand led to his academic interest in it. He defends his particular interest in southeastern furniture as opposed to other American styles because of its rich and complex history. Not to say that the South’s tradition is richer than the rest of the country, but “after 1607 the South forged complex creolized societies for its scale—[The South’s] political and social history can be brutal, but its cultural history is very rich,” says Couch. He says that decorative arts is a perfect interdisciplinary field, which still has strong ties to the arts.
So what does he plan to bring to the museum? Well, in his two-year appointment, Couch wants to focus on activities that will make a permanent contribution to Georgia decorative arts research and scholarship. We’re glad he’s taking time off archiving to spend more time researching and organizing with us!
I asked Couch what his favorite pieces in the collection are, and he picked two pieces donated by an esteemed patron, Beverly Bremer. The first is a faded painted blue desk chair most likely from Elbert County, Ga. The maker is unknown, but this doesn’t mean we can’t talk about its stylistic and historical implications. The chair retains its original blue-green painted surface and exhibits several features characteristic of southern chairs, such as the flat scrolled arm surmounting the arm support. Also typical are turned stretchers, acorn finials and peaked slats with chamfered top edges. Below the yellow pine writing surface is a suspended drawer made of ash; the slats, writing arm support and posts are birch, while the stretchers are ash. This chair probably belonged to a monetarily comfortable family, as the desk implies literacy. Couch loves this piece because the worn paint adds another level of interest to the chair’s history: you can see that people have sat in it and that it has served many generations. The beautiful worn blue paint personalizes the object and gives it character. The chair once belonged to Frank Horton, founder of the museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Winston-Salem, N.C., and was acquired by Bremer, who generously donated this piece to the museum.
His second favorite GMOA decorative arts piece is a silver teapot dating from ca. 1819–1840. This piece is of particular interest not only because of its impeccable craftsmanship and distinct design, but also because it was conceived by Frederic Marquand, a well-known silversmith in the South. Marquand was born in Fairfield, Conn., but did business in both Savannah and New York. Between the two cities, Marquand’s workshop churned out numerous pieces—mostly jewelry and other decorative household items in sterling. Marquand is one of the most discussed individuals associated with silver in 19th-century Georgia. Although he spent a lot of time making silver in New York as well, he had a great many affinities with the South, and Georgia in particular. A review of Marquand’s will, according to the New York Times, suggests he maintained an affection for the South many decades after leaving Savannah. Couch's interest in the teapot stems from the idea that the object is fully transformed into sculpture by the figural addition of the fox. Essentially, this piece exemplifies the reasons for his particular admiration of the decorative arts: graduating art into daily life through the merging of ornamentation and use.
No comments:
Post a Comment