Embroidering the Landscape by Andrea Pappas
Andrea Pappas (Art and Art History) embarked on a research trip for her new project, "Representing Enslavement in 18th-Century Embroidery" at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), where she held the Jay and Deborah Last Fellowship this summer. In addition to examining the embroidery holdings of the AAS, she traced the provenance of specific textiles, examined archival material such as diaries, church records, tax records, letters, wills, and probate inventories to trace the lives of the enslaved persons depicted in two pictorial embroideries that have descended in the two branches of a prominent New England family. She also visited the Worcester Art Museum for its archival material, art, and household objects once belonging to that same family. Following her tenure at AAS, she spent a week in Boston, where she worked at the Massachusetts Historical Society examining the papers of an important collector of embroidery, and at the Fine Arts Museum, Boston, examining textiles and other objects such as family silver, portraits, and mourning jewelry.
