New Installations of Kentucky Art and Antiques

I’ve recently completed two installations at The Speed Art Museum that feature great Kentucky art.

For the exhibition Pursuing the Masterpiece, I’ve installed the fantastic Kentucky sugar desk I discussed previously. Using maps, texts, and images, the desk is placed in both its historic and antiquarian contexts. I also produced a video featuring the husband-and-wife collectors who gave the desk to the Speed. They are a remarkable pair, having spent 40 years building one of the state’s finest collections of early Kentucky antiques and art. Here’s a short clip of the husband, Bob Noe, describing the desk:

I also recently installed Modern in the Making: Design 1900-2000, which features over 50 pieces from the Speed’s collection.

Hadley Pottery bowl, 1956

Kentucky is represented by several objects, including three pieces designed by Mary Alice Hadley (1911-1965) for Louisville’s Hadley Pottery.

I’ve also included a beautiful set of turned rosewood bowls made by Kentucky’s Rude Osolnik (1915-2001), one of the United States’ great craft artisans.

Salad set, about 1950 by Rude Osolnik

Finally, Kentucky’s rich ceramic tradition is respresented by a wonderful Bybee Pottery face pitcher made in Bybee, Kentucky.

Bybee Pottery pitcher and mugs, about 1940

Visiting Kentucky, 1807-1809

Period accounts of Kentucky (or anywhere else) can’t always be taken at face value. Often their authors had ulterior motives. John Filson’s famous The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucke (1784) was, shall we say, rather optimistic in its descriptions. If Filson could get settlers to the state, he could make money from his land investments.

Fortunately, Fortescue Cuming’s Sketches of a Tour to the Western Country (1810) offers a more objective view. His very readable travel journal traces his roundabout trip from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, down the Ohio River, back to Pittsburgh, back down the Ohio, and on to the Mississippi.

For those interested in Kentucky life during the early nineteenth century, it makes for great reading. There’s information, too, for those interested in Kentucky antiques. Lately, I’ve been working on a research project involving the Kentucky State Penitentiary. Why? The state pen’s workshops produced chairs for many decades. The pen also produced stone slabs, some of which may have been used atop furniture.

Cuming provides a detailed description of the Kentucky pen as it existed in 1807. Along with a description of the facility, he notes the presence of “twenty-four miserable wretches” imprisoned there…and also gives a list of the work they did as “nailors, coopers, chair makers, turners, and stone cutters, the latter of whom cut and polish marble slabs of all sizes…”