supporting our DECORATIVE ARTS STUDENTS
Both Linda Chesnut, our long-time chair of the museum’s Decorative Arts Advisory Committee (DAAC), and her husband, David, have been stalwart supporters of our decorative arts program. w HAT YOU MAY NOT KNOW know is that that support now extends to students studying decorative arts with us. In 2020, the Linda Crowe Chesnut Student Award was established, going annually to a student who has demonstrated excellence in research and study of the decorative arts or a closely allied field. Gifts like this one that allow us to pay or otherwise compensate our students help us move away from volunteer positions and toward greater diversity in the field. This award can be given not just for excellence in research and study, but also for contributions to exhibition design and mounting or research and editing in service to the museum or sustaining a passionate interest in the field of decorative arts. Recipients may be either a current University of Georgia student (graduate or undergraduate) or a recent UGA graduate and receive an unconditional honorarium of $500 as well as the opportunity to apply for $500 in travel funds. Up to two students per calendar year may receive it. This goal of the award is to gird future interest and participation in decorative arts in Georgia, which makes it appropriate that it bear Linda Chesnut’s name. Chesnut was the first graduate of all three tracts of the Institute for Southern Material Culture, holds a master’s degree in design from Georgia State University and has been a scholar, supporter and enthusiast of southern decorative arts over her lifetime. She has received awards for her work to promote Georgia decorative arts including the museum’s M. Smith Griffith Volunteer of the Year Award, a Georgia Governor’s Award in the Humanities and the Henry D. Green Lifetime Achievement Award for the Decorative Arts. Recently retired curator of decorative arts Dale L. Couch wrote, in his nomination of Chesnut for the latter, that she “has been instrumental in preserving Georgia’s material culture and seeing that that culture was shared with scholars and the
Linda Chesnut with museum director William U. Eiland.
public alike. She has participated in every major exhibition of Georgia material since 1980, including those of the Atlanta Historical Society and the High Museum of Art.” He added, “As a component in the decorative arts establishment, she is invaluable and continues to contribute to it in many ways. She is unassuming and eschews a public presence but works tirelessly in the background for the success of this state’s preservation and study of its decorative art, architecture and material culture.” The first two recipients of the Linda Crowe Chesnut Student Award, this past year, were Chason Dean and Charlotte Gaillet . Dean is a recent UGA graduate (in finance!), who was introduced to us through the exhibition “Modern Living: Giò Ponti and the 20th-Century Aesthetics of Design.” Since then, he has taken a passionate interest in Georgia’s material culture, participating in most programs at the Green Center and developing remarkable connoisseurship. He has already made important discoveries in Georgia decorative arts and was a lender to the exhibition “Material Georgia.” Couch says, Dean “is a brilliant example of how students with different academic backgrounds and career aims can benefit from life enrichment with the humanities and the museum in particular.” Charlotte Gaillet is a second-year master’s candidate in American art history at UGA, with a thesis underway that examines the impact of World War I on the artist Imogen Cunningham. She is currently an intern at the museum, where she works with decorative arts and material culture. She is also a graduate assistant at the Lamar Dodd School of Art and serves as president of its Association of Graduate Art Students. She will attend the 2021 Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts Summer Institute program, where she will research decorative arts within the Chesapeake area. She also read a paper at the 2020 Green Symposium interpreting a document recording landscape flowers in use in Savannah in the 19th century. In short, both Dean and Gaillet are studying Georgia decorative arts with the same zeal and focus as Chesnut has, following in her dedicated footsteps. We know that future recipients of the award will do the same, and we are excited to work with them.
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