AFA Summer 2019

Antiques & Fine Art 107 2019 HAND TO HAND Southern Craft of the Nineteenth Century Hand to Hand: Southern Craft of the 19th Century at the High Museum presents key works from its significant collection of nineteenth-century decorative arts to reflect the rich blend of cultural influences across the American South. Each work in the exhibition reveals both the talents of its maker and the history of craft traditions handed down from generation to generation. Techniques and forms drawn from a variety of African, Native American, and European sources reflect artistic individuality and regional traditions, as do the use of materials such as native woods, clay, cotton, and sweetgrass. Since the 1970s, the High has explored the importance of functional or decorative art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including folk or self-taught art crafted by individuals throughout the southeast or from across the United States. The museum now features some of the most important collections of their type, recently revealed in a new reinstallation of its collections galleries as well as within this exhibition. Slab sideboard, unidentified maker, Eastern North Carolina, 1800–1810. Painted yellow pine. 40½ x 54½ x 21 inches. Purchase with funds from the Decorative Arts Acquisition Endowment (1995.186). Furniture in rural Southern homes was functional. Made with readily available wood — often yellow pine — it was sometimes painted to disguise its humble materials and frequently to imitate more expensive woods. This sideboard instead features a particularly bold combination of colors, with orange and yellow drawers set in a frame of complementary blue. Typically found in dining rooms of the era, such tall-legged sideboards or serving tables — whether of common yellow pine or of more expensive imported mahogany and marble — were known as “slabs,” referring to their narrow, slab-like tops.