Homewood Museum Antiques Forum: Baltimore Through the Painted Canvas

Description

Federal period Baltimore (circa 1790-1810) was a city on the rise. As it flourished, so too did its community of artisans who produced exquisite and distinctive furniture, silver, and fine art. Painting was a critical component of this golden age of decorative art, during which painters such as Joshua Johnson (the earliest documented professional African American painter) and Francis Guy (early America's preeminent landscape artist) worked alongside printmakers to capture views of the city and its people.

For this year's all-virtual Antiques Forum, a roster of five distinguished scholars will turn to these early representations of the city to reveal the complexities, diversities, and stories uncovered through these works.

Each speaker will create a video talk that will be available for registered participants to watch on YouTube beginning at noon on Nov. 6. Participants can then watch the videos at their leisure between Nov. 6 and Nov. 13. Then, from 3 to 4 p.m. on Nov. 13, participants can join a Zoom call with the speakers for a live Q&A.

Homewood Museum's Antiques Forum is sponsored by Forbes and Sara Maner.

Speakers:

Emelie Gevalt is curator of folk art at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City and is pursuing her doctorate in American art history at the University of Delaware. Often looking at earlier material through the lens of twentieth-century histories of collecting and collective memory, her work encompasses research interests in 18th- and 19th-century American decorative painting, portraiture, African American material culture and representation, and the Colonial Revival movement. Gevalt received her BA in art history and theater studies from Yale University and her MA from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware. She has previously held positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and at Christie's, New York.

Katie McKinney is an assistant curator of maps and prints at Colonial Williamsburg, where she oversees the collection of prints, maps, and natural history collections. She holds a master's degree from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware (2015) and a BA in art history and history from James Madison University (2011). Currently, McKinney is co-curating "Promoting America: Maps of the Colonies and the New Republic", the first map exhibit to open in the new Carolyn and Michael McNamara Maps and Prints Gallery in the expanded Dewitt Wallace Museum at Colonial Williamsburg.

Heather Smith is a painting conservator working in private practice in Baltimore with a special interest in early American paintings. Prior to entering private practice, her experience includes internships at the Walters Art Museum and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. She received her master's degree in art conservation from Queen's University, Ontario, in 2004.

Elizabeth Raphael is a senior at the Johns Hopkins University studying international relations, art history, and French. Originally from Massachusetts, she became involved with Homewood during her freshman year through the Program in Museums and Society course "Enslaved at Homewood" and its resultant exhibition, "More Than A Name: Enslaved Families at Historic Homewood." For the past year, she has conducted research into the provenance and authorship of the museum's portrait of Charles Carroll of Carrollton.

Peter Fedoryk is a fellow in the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware (http://www.winterthurprogram.udel.edu/). He previously held a yearlong research fellowship with the Thomas Cole National Historic Site where he articulated the cultural and political backdrop of Cole's 1840s landscape paintings. Fedoryk is currently engaged with studying eco-material histories of early North America and writing his master's thesis on the use of elmwood in historic craft.