Virginia H. Adams, Architectural Historian, Painted Walls Steward

Ginny has worked in the field of historic preservation for over 40 years. She is a Senior Architectural Historian at The Public Archaeology Laboratory, Inc. in Rhode Island and teaches in the Master of Design Studies, Historic Preservation program at the Boston Architectural College in Massachusetts. She researches and helps preserve historic resources including buildings, bridges, and landscapes ranging in scale from single resources to large historic districts and ranging in time from the 17th to the mid-20th centuries. Since 2016, she and her husband have been the owners and curators of the Elwin Chase House in Topsham, Vermont, which contains painted wall murals in the front hall.

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Darlene Bialowski, Contract Museum Registrar and Appraiser & Immediate Past CPWP President

Darlene, a museum professional for over 25 years, has worked at prestigious museums including
several at the Smithsonian. She went into private practice in 2007. Her clients include museums, historical societies, cultural organizations, corporations, artists and private collectors. She is a generalist appraiser having achieved a certificate from the former NYU appraisal studies program and is accredited with the Appraisers Association of America. Darlene has published in trade and professional journals including the Journal of Advanced Appraisal Studies, she ghost-edited Managing Previously Unmanaged Collections, and is a contributing author to Is It Okay to Sell the Monet?  She is President and a founding Board member of Red Arch Cultural Heritage Law and Policy Research, a co-founder and President of the Collections Care & Conservation Alliance, and a co-founder of the Appraisers Alliance of New England.

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Amy Cole-Ives, Architectural Historian and Conservator

Amy is an architectural historian and conservator with Sutherland Conservation, a consulting firm she established 10 years ago in Augusta, Maine. She completed her undergraduate studies at Smith College in American Studies and Art History, and her graduate work in Historic Preservation and Architectural Conservation at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2013 Amy re-established her architectural paint research practice, setting up a state of the art microscopy lab at SCC’s Augusta, ME location. 

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Tim Cook, Architectural Historian

Tim has served for several years as Foreman for Recreate Inc., a construction company primarily doing historic restoration. He worked on several new construction homes using historic houses that had been dismantled and then were reconstructed. Tim and his wife Lynn are owners of the Moses Kent House in Lyme, NH, in which they have restored the original Porter/Poor style murals. Additionally, they have protected the future of the murals by imposing on the house a preservation easement with the NH Preservation Alliance.

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Katey Corda, Conservator of Murals and Decorated Architectural Surfaces

Katey has worked on walls around the world, including on renowned art spanning centuries, from King Tut’s Tomb to segments of the Berlin Wall. She led the conservation of two unique, 19th-century stenciled mural fragments from a farmhouse in Charlestown, RI, depicting historic political figures. She regularly acts as a consultant for large institutions such as the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles and the Houses of Parliament in London. Katey is skilled in both preventive and remedial conservation techniques, diagnostic investigations, and state-of-the-art methods of documentation. She holds an M.A. Degree in the Conservation of Wall Painting from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, UK.

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Catherine Cyr, Exhibition Coordinator, Maine Maritime Museum, Bath, Maine

Growing up in Western Maine, Catherine's early introduction to painted walls helped spark her interest in the decorative arts. She received her A.B. from Bowdoin College where she investigated the intersection of material culture and society through a self-designed American Studies major. She completed internships at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as an undergrad, and later participated in the Chipstone Foundation’s Object Lab and the Historic Deerfield Summer Fellowship Program. Prior to graduating with an M.A. from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture in 2022, where her research focused on Maine-made objects and architecture, she worked at the Pejepscot History Center in Brunswick, Maine.

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Marylou Davis, Conservator of Decorative Paint and Gilded surfaces.

Mary Lou also designs and replicates historic decorative surfaces including wallpapers for museums, pipe organ builders and churches. Mary Lou apprenticed under European cabinetmakers, finishers and gilders in the 1970’s and holds a BA in Art History from Smith College. 

 

Nancy Druckman, Art Advisor

After 43 years at Sotheby’s, most recently acting as a senior vice-president, Nancy Druckman is hanging out her shingle as an art advisor. Nancy directed the American folk art department at Sotheby’s since 1974, building it into the market leader while establishing herself as a pivotal figure in the field.  In her new role as an independent consultant, she will offer strategies for collections management, advising clients on buying, selling, donating and documenting works and providing guidance on strategic collections management. An advisor to museums and institutions, Druckman has been especially active in the American Folk Art Museum and has appeared frequently on the PBS series Antiques Roadshow. Nancy’s consulting business website is www.nancydruckmanart.com.

 

Helaine Fendelman, Appraiser, Antiques Consultant & Immediate Past CPWP Vice President

Helaine is a generalist fine and decorative arts appraiser specializing in estate, divorce and donation evaluations and a certified member and past President of the Appraisers Association of America, Inc. She is a longtime contributor to Hearst's Country Living Magazine, she co-authors a weekly syndicated column "Treasures in Your Attic" for Tronc (Tribune Information Services) and co-hosted  "Treasures in Your Attic," a television show seen on PBS stations.  She has extensive non-profit board experience and has worked as a consultant for numerous museums and historical societies throughout the US. Helaine is a member of Art Table, a former director of the National Arts Club, is a member of the Board of Advisors for the Salvador Dali Research Center. 

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Polly Forcier, Wall Stencil Historian

After studying Early American Decoration for many years after the tradition of her mother, the 1980's found Polly with a developing interest in wall stenciling. Under the guidance of mentor, Jessica Bond, many walls of original stenciling in VT and NH were recorded.  In 1994, Polly started MB Historic Decor offering more than 700 original stencils for walls & floors.

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Emelie Gevalt, Curator of Folk Art, American Folk Art Museum & Former CPWP Board of Directors

Emelie received her BA in art history and theater studies from Yale University and herMA from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture. Her Winterthur thesis, on the topic of early eighteenth-century painted chests from Taunton, Massachusetts, was recently published in the Chipstone Foundation’s American Furniture. Her research has been supported in part by grants from the Craft Research Fund and the Decorative ArtsTrust. She has previously held positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston – where she was part of the curatorial team for the exhibitions Women Take the Floor and Collecting Stories: The Invention of Folk Art – and at Christie’s, New York, where she was a Vice President in the department of Estates, Appraisals and Valuations.

 

Emelie recently curated Signature Styles: Friendship, Album, and Fundraising Quilts, as part of a series of quilts exhibitions at the museum’s location in Long Island City. In addition to her curatorial work, Emelie is pursuing her doctorate in American art history at the University of Delaware, where her scholarship has been supported by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Curatorial Track PhD Fellowship. Often looking at earlier material through the lens of twentieth-century histories of collecting and collective memory, her work encompasses research interests in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American portraiture, decorative painting, the Colonial Revival movement, and African American

material culture and representation.

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Philippe Halbert, Richard Koopman Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

A graduate of the College of William and Mary and the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, Philippe received his PhD in the history of art from Yale University in 2022. He joined the staff of the Wadsworth Atheneum later that year, and is currently overseeing a reinstallation of the early American art collection and a reinterpretation of the circa 1746 Wetmore Parlor. Philippe has authored essays on a variety of topics published by the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Corning Museum of Glass, and the Daughters of the American Revolution. He has completed museum internships and held academic fellowships at institutions in the United States and France including Colonial Williamsburg, the Louvre, Historic Deerfield, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Terra Foundation for the American Art, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.
 

Wenda Kochanowski, Conservator

After attending the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Wenda worked for several different artisans and craftspeople, where she learned valuable hand skills like hand painting, ceramic casting and glazing, and wood finishing. Completing some courses in furniture making at the North Bennet Street School helped Wenda realize that she was interested in furniture conservation. She worked for several years with Peter Verheyen, a restorer who frequently used conservation methods in his furniture treatments. Wenda then went on to work at Robert Mussey Associates, a furniture conservation company, from 2003-2012, primarily doing finish treatments on furniture.

Since 2012 Wenda has worked as an independent contractor and sole proprietor of WK Conservation. Her primary interest and knowledge is about finishes, gilding, and decorative painting and treatments on furniture and other surfaces.  She has done work for the Peabody Essex Museum, The Colonial Society of MA, The Trustees of the Reservations, the Colonial Dames of MA, the Nichols House in Boston, Emmanuel Church of Boston, the Park Service, Harvard Art LLC, Decorative Arts Conservation (Christine Thomson), The Crosby Company, New Bedford Public Library, Thayer Memorial Library, Fuller Public Library, and the Groton Historical Society, as well as for private clients. Wenda is a member of the American Institute of Conservation.

 

Suzanne Korn, Historian/ Researcher/Artist  

Suzanne has written several articles on historic wall stenciling and served on the CPWP Board of Directors for a year, helping to develop a Business Plan for the non-profit.  She continues her support of CPWP as an Advisor.

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Johanna McBrien, Executive Director, Dedham Historical Society & Museum

Johanna is a graduate of the Winterthur Program, was formerly a furniture specialist at Christie's New York, Northeast Auctions, and Wayne Pratt Antiques.  She is also a founding editor and current editor-at-large of Antiques & Fine Art magazine based in Massachusetts.

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Miranda Peters, Registrar, Shelburne Museum

Miranda fell in love with folk art in college—much to the dismay of her landlord who made her paint over her early attempts at recreating murals from the Moses Kent House on the kitchen cabinets of her apartment. She continued to fuel this interest through her work with the Rufus Porter Museum, American Folk Art Museum, and Shelburne Museum. Miranda spearheaded new collections management programs at the Preservation Society of Newport County in RI and at Fort Ticonderoga in NY. She received her BA in History from the University of North Carolina at Asheville and her MA in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center in NYC. Her MA thesis focused on Rufus Porter’s publishing career through Curious Arts and Scientific American.

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Sumpter Priddy, Antiques Dealer

Sumpter had an early interest in antiques and history instilled in him from childhood with family that took him to country sales and antique shops in the Virginia countryside. At sixteen he toured Winterthur—Henry Francis du Pont’s grand house museum in Delaware and he knew he wanted to be a curator. He began to educate himself in earnest about American furniture. Priddy graduated from the University of Virginia and was a fellow in the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture in the mid-1970s. He worked at Colonial Williamsburg and then opened his first antiques shop in Richmond.  In 1993 he moved to a shop in Alexandria, where he continues his extensive study in southern decorative arts. In 2004 he published American Fancy: Exuberance in the Arts, 1790-1840, a landmark book and exhibition that reintroduced the cohesive aesthetic philosophy that had colored the entire range of middle-class American sensibilities in the period, but had all but disappeared into a jumble of misconceptions and misunderstandings. He came to realize “that we knew comparatively little about the world that shaped our evolution as southerners.” And that realization sparked what became a consuming quest to illuminate the southern past, not only by reclaiming far-flung objects but by understanding the context in which they were created. 

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Christine Thomson, Conservator

Christine is an independent Conservator who has worked in many different venues.  She is currently working with CPWP on a wall conservation project.

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Elizabeth Warren, Museum Consultant

Liz has devoted the past 35 years to the study and writing about American Folk Art.  After graduating from Bryn Mawr College, she was a journalist at House Beautiful covering hone furnishings market as well as art and antiques. While working at House Breautiful she received an MA from NYU in Folk Art Studies. Since 1991 she has been consulting curator at the American Folk Art Museum.  In 2007 she was elected to the Museum's Board of Trustees and also serves on the Board of Trustees at Bryn Mawr College. 

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Amber Wingerson, Curator of Exhibits and Collections, Sullivan Museum and History Center at Norwich University

Amber holds a Master’s in Public History from Duquesne University as well as a Master’s in the History of Decorative Arts from George Mason University in partnership with the Smithsonian Associates. A trained museum professional, Wingerson held positions in various museums, archives, and historic houses prior to the Sullivan Museum, including The Trustees of Reservations and the Preservation Society of Newport County. It was at the Trustees of Reservations that Amber became interested in painted wall decoration through a fellowship at the Stevens-Coolidge House in Andover, Massachusetts, which has a painted wall mural that extends two stories.

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