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'HINDSIGHT' Artists Preserve Memories Through Paintings, Objects

1/28/2022

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Below: Curators Andrew Richmond and Hollie Davis
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Capturing the simplicity of earlier days in rural Ohio, memory painters offer unassuming visual interpretations of life in the Midwest. Their work will be on display in a new exhibit at the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio, called HINDSIGHT: The Art of Looking Back. The exhibition will run January 29 through April 24.

For curators Andrew Richmond and Hollie Davis, the exhibit is an opportunity to pull back the curtains and see the many layers of stories that each piece tells.
“We are in a public moment, where we are looking at nostalgia and monuments, and the context in which the storyteller tells the story changes constantly,” Richmond said.

Often compared with the work of the New York-born Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses, whose paintings feature nostalgic interpretations of the New England landscape, the Ohio painters in Hindsight offer similar snapshots of life in the Buckeye state.

Artists featured in the exhibit include Leuty McGuffey Manahan, Paul Patton, Harold Everett Bayer, Charles Owens and Tella Kitchen. Richmond says Menahan’s work serves as a great example of how a painting can share a deeper story that goes beyond face value. 

“She’s painting warm and fuzzy memories of churning butter and cutting ice, but it wasn’t really that fun,” he said. “This is back-breaking, grinding work.”​

Davis says many of the paintings in the exhibition show how living during a particular time period could be difficult. Many of the nostalgic paintings can also be relatable to exhibition visitors today.

“We also chose examples that you can see are not so subtle,” she said. “In Manahan’s painting, Mother’s Day, the house is in complete disarray and kids are everywhere. A woman is in the middle of it working away. (The artist) was not sold on the nostalgia of the good old days, either.”

In addition to paintings, the exhibition will include three-dimensional “memory objects,” including photographs of colonial-style interiors and gardens taken by the early 20th-century New England minister Wallace Nutting, as well as some of Nutting’s reproduction of colonial-era furniture.

“We try to bring interesting objects in,” Richmond said. “In the past, we had extensive interpretive labels. With this one, there’s going to be basic information. It’s really a chance for people to get in and engage with the objects on their own terms, to think about them and their memories, and how we preserve and consolidate our own memories.”

A native Ohioan, Richmond received a bachelor’s degree in history from Kenyon College and a master’s degree in American Material Culture from the Winterthur Museum and the University of Delaware. After more than a decade in the world of antiques and art auctions, he is now a certified personal property appraiser and decorative arts adviser.

With a passion for Ohio decorative arts, Andrew has lectured and published widely on the subject. His previous exhibitions were Equal in Goodness: Ohio Decorative Arts, 1788-1860 (2011), A Tradition of Progress: Ohio Decorative Arts, 1860-1945 (2015), and An Ohio Childhood: 200 Years of Growing Up (2016, co-curated with Davis).

Hailing from the mountains of central West Virginia, Davis is a librarian by training, having received degrees in English from West Virginia Wesleyan University and library and information science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After years working in public libraries, she began working for an online antiques auction price database, which she now owns.

In addition to co-curating An Ohio Childhood, Hollie provided significant research and writing assistance for both Equal in Goodness and A Tradition of Progress. She is the lead author of “Beneath the Surface,” a monthly column about working and living with “old stuff” in the Maine Antiques Digest. 
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Above: Mother's Day by Leuty McGuffey Manahan.

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Three Centuries of Valentines on display at DACO

1/27/2022

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Reflecting nearly 150 years of valentines, a new exhibition at the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio is sure to steal the hearts of visitors.

The exhibition, “Valentines: Tokens of Love,” will run Jan. 29 through Feb. 27 and will feature hundreds of Valentine’s Day cards and mementos ranging from the late 1700s to the 1950s.
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Two special Curator’s Talks will take place in February with Dr. George Johnson, who curated the exhibition with his wife, Jeanne. The talks will take place at noon and 2 p.m., Feb. 13, just in time for Valentine’s Day. Cost is $10 for members or $5 for members with prepaid registration. Admission at the door is $15. Register here for the noon talk and here for the 2 p.m. talk.  

Dr. Johnson shared some of the ways suitors declared their love and how the act of giving a Valentine evolved into a favorite children’s activity every year.
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What are some of the highlights from the exhibition that visitors can look forward to seeing? We will have Valentines from the 1700s, 1800s and 1900s on the main floor. One of the earliest ones has a date of 1823 and a letter that goes with it. They will be grouped by decades. Visitors will see how they change over the years - graphically, artistically and historically. As we get into the 1850s and 1860s, we see that they begin to get mass-produced as opposed to hand-crafted.

What did mass production of Valentine’s Day cards look like during this time? They were made in a workshop, almost like an assembly line, and usually done by ladies who would have a bunch of materials around them to make the cards. It wasn’t a machine or assembly line like you’d see today. The ladies got to pick and choose the materials as they assembled them. There’s a certain element of style that’s all the same, but there is also a lot of variety and small elements that are different.

How did the inkwork vary over the years? Mostly all of the older Valentines were hand-done and the writing on them is in ink calligraphy. In the 1930s, there was copper-plate printing. Images were printed as an outline, the same as you would see in a newspaper, then hand-water colored with other pieces added to it, such as gold or silver paper trim, dried flowers and embellishments like that.

When did we start to see manufacturers use modern-day practices to create Valentines? When we move into the 1870s and 1880s, they created mechanical Valentines. You’ll see layers to them and wheels that spin, and hidden messages were a big thing. It’s hard sometimes to put yourself into the mind of a suitor. I like to think that they were thinking, “I want to tell her I love her, but I don’t want her dad to get bent out of shape.” The messages were hidden, and the boy could tell the girl where to look.
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Did Valentines ever go above and beyond in meaning? Valentines were proposals, and often had a gold ring in the paper. There were even proposals for elopements. One of the most interesting is a Valentine from 1820 that was a puzzle purse. They would tell people’s futures by sharing messages on the sides of them. A tab or silk cord would allow it to expand. It’s all paper engineering. I like that time period because they were very clever with their structure and design. 

What have been some of your favorites from your collection? In the 1900s to 1920s, the most popular Valentines were fold-down or fold-out Valentines. They were mechanical, creating a very three-dimensional piece. Simple ones had two layers and more complicated ones had six or seven layers. These allowed you to look through the 3D piece and were very fragile. They were usually made in Germany at this point in time and the background of the card was printed separately. Workers picked the images and assembled them with flowers. These are some of my favorites because they are very elaborate and come in all different shapes, from taxis and boats to carriages, children, birds and angels.

When did school Valentines become popular? In the 1930s to 1950s, most of the Valentines we have are school Valentines. Before that, Valentines were for adults. Into the 1950s, kids began exchanging them at school and building Valentine boxes for classmates. Some of them that are my favorites from that time period are homemade ones from the 1930s. They tell a story of those people badly affected by depression and those who still had money. You can see each of the classes in the Valentines they gave to each other. 

Do any of the class Valentines stand out to you? One that sticks out in my mind is a small Christmas card that was recycled for a Valentine’s Day card. I find those very poignant. That’s what that kid had to give. Some others are cut out of catalogs and others are nice commercially made pieces from the time. It really shows the stratification of classes during the Great Depression. World War II Valentines depicted what was going on in the war. Some were sent from camps where soldiers were stationed up until they were deployed. Some sent them to wives, and the return address is a camp or APO. So those are always interesting. The historian in you always wonders if that is the last card that she got and if he made it home. 
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daco welcomes reeves as weekend manager

1/16/2022

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The Decorative Arts Center of Ohio is pleased to welcome Mary Anne Reeves as our new Weekend Manager. She is responsible for all museum and museum shop operations during our weekend hours.

With a graduate degree in art history, she worked for 16 years at the Ohio Historic Preservation office in Athens, Ohio, where she still resides. Over the course of her career, Reeves has taught courses related to architecture and history at Ohio University, Hocking College, Rio Grande University and Columbus State Community College.

Reeves says she’s excited to work at DACO, where she’s been a loyal patron for many years. “I was drawn to DACO because it combines my love of art, architecture and meeting new people," she said.

Welcome to DACO!

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Decorative Arts Center of Ohio
145 E. Main St.
Lancaster, Ohio 43130
Phone: 740-681-1423