Hiram Powers, “The Greek Slave,” model 1841-43, carved 1846, Florence, Italy. Seravezza marble. National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Collection (Gift of William Wilson Corcoran), 2014.79.37.

MEDIA, PENN. – The Decorative Arts Trust congratulates author Caitlin Meehye Beach, Historic Rock Ford and the New-York Historical Society on receiving Failey Grants.

The Failey Grant program provides $25,000 in support for noteworthy research, exhibition, publication and conservation projects through the Dean F. Failey Fund, named in honor of the trust’s late governor. Preference is given to projects that employ or are led by emerging professionals in the museum field.

Thomas Commeraw, Jug, 1797-1819, New York City. Stoneware, cobalt oxide. Impressed on front: “Commeraw’s/Stoneware/ Corlears/Hook/N. York.” New-York Historical Society, purchased from Elie Nadelman, 1937.820.

Caitlin Meehye Beach, an assistant professor in the department of art history and affiliated faculty in the department of African and African American studies at Fordham University, will utilize grant funds for her forthcoming book, Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery, which will be published by the University of California Press in 2022. The text will examine how a wide range of works of sculpture and decorative art – from antislavery medallions to statues of bondspeople bearing broken chains – gave visual form to narratives about abolition in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.

Historic Rock Ford in Lancaster, Penn., will use grant funding for further research and interpretation of the more than 200 objects in its John J. Snyder Jr Gallery of Early Lancaster County Decorative Arts. The goal is to uncover more about the shops, apprentices, laborers, indentured laborers and enslaved workers who contributed to the gallery’s collection of furniture, silver, clocks and paintings from the mid-1700s to the early 1800s.

A tall clock exhibit at the John J. Snyder Jr Gallery of Early Lancaster County Decorative Arts at Historic Rock Ford.

The New-York Historical Society received grant funding for the groundbreaking exhibition “Crafting Freedom: Uncovering the Life and Legacy of Free Black Potter Thomas Commeraw,” to be presented January to June 2023 in the Pam & Scott Schafler Gallery. “Crafting Freedom” will be the first exhibition focused solely on Commeraw, a free Black craftsman descended from enslaved people, who was active as a master potter from the 1790s through 1819.

For additional information, www.decorativeartstrust.org or 610-627-4970.