The Georgia Museum of Art will host the fifth Henry D. Green Symposium of the Decorative Arts, “Neighboring Voices: The Decorative Culture of Our Southern Cousins,” Jan. 29-30 at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education Conference Center and Hotel.
The symposium will bring together representatives from neighboring states to discuss their research, collections and decorative-arts history. Topics to be discussed include the discovery of Georgia’s early decorative arts, the paint-decorated furniture of Piedmont North Carolina, the influence of Georgia potters on Alabama pottery, the profile of a Southern antebellum silversmith, German toys in American childhood, French porcelain in the antebellum South and early Georgians’ migration to Alabama.
Robert A. Leath, vice president of collections and research at the Old Salem Museums and Gardens in Winston-Salem, N.C., will give the symposium’s keynote address. Entitled “Georgia on Our Minds: MESDA and the Discovery of Georgia’s Early Decorative Arts,” the lecture is open to the public. It will be held Jan. 29 at 7 p.m. in Mahler Auditorium of the Georgia Center. All other events are ticketed events that require advance registration.
The biennial symposia series honors the late Henry D. Green, an early and distinguished proponent of the study of Georgia’s decorative arts.
He is known as a pioneer in the movement to recognize the state’s rich legacy in the decorative arts.