Modern Gothic: The Inventive Furniture of Kimbel and Cabus, 1863-82

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Medill Harvey &  Barbara Veith, Guest Lecturers

Free for ICAA Members
$20 General Public
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Registration will close 1 hour prior to webinar.

Over the course of their nearly twenty-year partnership, immigrant cabinetmakers Anton Kimbel (1822-1895) and Joseph Cabus (1824-1898) developed one of New York City’s leading furniture and decorating firms, capturing national attention with their inventive Modern Gothic designs. They melded British and Continental design sources to create a wide range of forward-looking forms that appealed to equally adventurous clientele. Join guest curator Barbara Veith and co-author Medill H. Harvey, Ruth Bigelow Wriston Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts and manager, The Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art for a Zoom lecture in which they share new scholarship and fresh insight into the firm and its contributions to American design history.

Medill Harvey is the Ruth Bigelow Wriston Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts and Manager of the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She oversees the collections of American silver, jewelry, and other metalwork, as well as mid-nineteenth-century furniture. Medill joined the staff of the American Wing to direct research for the exhibition Art and The Empire City (2000). She is co-author of Early American Silver in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2013) and a contributing author for American Silver in the Art Institute of Chicago (2016). She contributed to The Met’s 2011 and 2009 reinstallations of the American silver and jewelry collections and the exhibition Silversmiths to the Nation (2007). Her most recent publication is Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co. (2021), written to accompany an exhibition that will be mounted at The Met in 2024. She is also a co-author and a consulting curator for Modern Gothic: The Inventive Furniture of Kimbel and Cabus, 1863-82 (2021), an exhibition and catalogue produced by the Brooklyn Museum. Medill graduated Summa Cum Laude from Dartmouth College with a BA in art history, graduated with distinction from The Works of Art Course at Sotheby’s Educational Studies in London, and was awarded a master’s degree with honors in Decorative Art History by the Cooper Hewitt Museum / Parsons.

Barbara Veith came to the Brooklyn Museum in 2018 as Curatorial Research Assistant to Dr. Barry R. Harwood, Curator of Decorative Arts, to help organize this exhibition; she is honored to have completed it in his memory in consultation with Medill Higgins Harvey. From 2010 to 2017, Veith was adjunct faculty at the Cooper-Hewitt/Parsons MA Program in the History of Design. She guest-curated Aesthetic Ambitions: Edward Lycett and Brooklyn’s Faience Manufacturing Company, an exhibition that originated at the University Museums, University of Richmond, Virginia, in 2011 and traveled to the Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina, and the Brooklyn Museum. From 1999 to 2009, she was a research associate in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and contributed to exhibitions that included Women China Decorators in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2001) and Louis Comfort Tiffany at Laurelton Hall: An Artist’s Country Estate (2005). Veith holds a B.A. in art history from Mount Holyoke College and earned an M.A. in decorative art history in the Cooper-Hewitt/Parsons master’s program.

This program will be presented on Zoom. The link will be sent 24 hours prior to the event.

Image:Kimbel and Cabus (New York, 1863–82). Cabinet-Secretary, circa 1875. Painted cherry, gilding, copper, brass, leather, earthenware, 60 × 35 × 14 in. (152.4 × 88.9 × 35.6 cm). Brooklyn Museum; Bequest of DeLancey Thorn Grant in memory of her mother, Louise Floyd-Jones Thorn, by exchange, 1991.126. (Photo: Gavin Ashworth)