NEW HAVEN, CONN. — Patricia E. Kane, Friends of American Arts curator of American decorative arts at Yale University Art Gallery, was honored for 50 years of service to the university at a dinner on March 27. Kane was among 342 employees celebrating milestone anniversaries at Yale.
“Collectively, you have contributed 7,085 years,” Yale President Peter Salovey said in an accompanying announcement. Kane was the only staffer acknowledged for a tenure of half a century.
Kane has been at Yale since receiving her master’s degree from the University of Delaware, Winterthur Program in Early American Culture in 1968. She received her PhD from Yale in 1987.
The curator’s publications include The American Clock, 1725–1865: The Mabel Brady Garvan and Other Collections at Yale University (with Edwin A. Battison), 1973, 300 Years of American Seating Furniture: Chairs and Beds from the Mabel Brady Garvan and Other Collections at Yale University, 1976, and Colonial Massachusetts Silversmiths and Jewelers: A Biographical Dictionary based on the Notes of Francis Hill Bigelow and John Marshall Phillips, 1998.
Since 2002, Kane has directed the Rhode Island Furniture Archive, documenting furniture and furniture making in Rhode Island from 1636 through the early Nineteenth Century. The results of this research are disseminated through a website, www.rifa.art.yale.edu, and a publication, Art and Industry in Early America: Rhode Island Furniture 1650–1830. The latter accompanied an exhibition at the Art Gallery in 2016–2017. The publication earned the Historic New England Book Prize and the Decorative Arts Society’s Charles F. Montgomery Prize.
Yale also cited Kane, winner of awards from the Wunsch Americana Foundation in 2013 and the Antique Dealers’ Association of America in 2017, for her role in mentoring younger scholars and for her success in raising funds to endow her department. Her position will be renamed the Patricia E. Kane curator of American Decorative Arts when she steps down.
Yale University Art Gallery is at 1111 Chapel Street. For information, www.artgallery.yale.edu.
