The decorative arts and material culture get their full due at this lovely online collection created by the University of Wisconsin's Digital Collections program. With generous funding from the Chipstone Foundation, the staff members at the Digital Collections program have digitized a variety of primary and secondary resources related to the decorative arts, with a particular focus on Early...
According to the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) website, southern antiques were ignored and dismissed by collectors and scholars in the first half of the 20th century. However, in 1965, a museum dedicated to "the preservation, scholarship, and connoisseurship of southern decorative arts and material culture" opened in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, curated by a pioneering mother...
The Winterthur Museum in Wilmington, Delaware is one of the premier museums of American material culture, located in the childhood home of industrialist and collector Henry Francis du Pont (1880-1969). For those unable to visit in person, the Winterthur Digital Collection includes detailed records, many accompanied by images, for the majority of the approximately 90,000 collection objects -...
Finns, Germans, Italians, and countless other groups have contributed mightily to the decorative arts traditions within the Badger State, and this lovely online database pays homage to those works, while also offering scholars and others access to this important collection. Inspired by the fieldwork undertaken by the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in the 1970s and 1980s, this project...