Both Linda Chesnut, our long-time chair of the museum’s Decorative Arts Advisory Committee (DAAC), and her husband, David, have been stalwart supporters of our decorative arts program. What you may not know is that that support now extends to students studying decorative arts with us. The museum’s decades-old internship program extends to nearly every department, including students who work with curators. In 2020, the Linda Crowe Chesnut Student Award was established, going annually to a student who has demonstrated excellence in research and study of the decorative arts or a closely allied field such as fashion design, interior design, material culture or history.
Unpaid internships are a hallmark and an unfortunate feature of the museum world, but gifts like this one that allow us to pay or otherwise compensate our students help us move away from volunteer positions and toward greater diversity in future museum professionals. This award can be given not just for excellence in research and study, but also for contributions to exhibition design and mounting or research and editing in service to the museum or sustaining a passionate interest in the field of decorative arts. Recipients may be either a current University of Georgia student (graduate or undergraduate) or a recent UGA graduate and receive an unconditional honorarium of $500 as well as the opportunity to apply for $500 more in travel funds to attend scholarly events or visit another institution or historic site(s). Up to two students per calendar year may receive it.
This goal of the award is to gird future interest and participation in the field of decorative arts in Georgia, which makes it appropriate that it bear Linda Chesnut’s name. Chesnut was the first graduate of all three tracts of the Institute for Southern Material Culture, holds a master’s degree in design from Georgia State University and has been a scholar, supporter and enthusiast of southern decorative arts over her lifetime. She has received awards for her work to promote Georgia decorative arts including the museum’s M. Smith Griffith Volunteer of the Year Award, a Georgia Governor’s Award in the Humanities and the Henry D. Green Lifetime Achievement Award for the Decorative Arts.
Recently retired curator of decorative arts Dale L. Couch wrote, in his nomination of Chesnut for the latter, that she “has been instrumental in preserving Georgia’s material culture and seeing that that culture was shared with scholars and the public alike. She has participated in every major exhibition of Georgia material since 1980, including those of the Atlanta Historical Society and the High Museum of Art.” He added, “As a component in the decorative arts establishment, she is invaluable and continues to contribute to it in many ways. She is unassuming and eschews a public presence but works tirelessly in the background for the success of this state’s preservation and study of its decorative art, architecture and material culture. She is a remarkable asset to this museum, this university, this region and is a sustained contributor to everything Georgia. She is also a quiet, gracious person of great kindness who is widely known as someone above reproach.”
The first two recipients of the Linda Crowe Chesnut Student Award, this past year, were Chason Dean and Charlotte Gaillet. Dean is a recent UGA graduate (in finance!), who was introduced to us through the exhibition “Modern Living: Giò Ponti and the 20th-Century Aesthetics of Design.” Since then, he has taken a passionate interest in Georgia’s material culture, participating in most programs at the Green Center and developing remarkable connoisseurship. He has already made important discoveries in Georgia decorative arts and was a lender to the exhibition “Material Georgia.” Couch says, Dean “is a brilliant example of how students with different academic backgrounds and career aims can benefit from life enrichment with the humanities and the museum in particular.”
Charlotte Gaillet is a second-year master’s candidate in American art history at UGA, having received a bachelor’s degree in art history and political science from UGA in 2019. Her current research interests intersect at cultural history and art, culminating in her thesis research topic, which examines the impact of World War I on California-based artist Imogen Cunningham. She currently serves as an intern at the museum, where she works with decorative arts and material culture. She is also a graduate assistant at the Lamar Dodd School of Art and serves as president of its Association of Graduate Art Students. She is an accepted participant for the 2021 Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts Summer Institute program, where she will travel and research decorative arts within the Chesapeake area, and she read a paper at the 2020 Green Symposium interpreting a document recording landscape flowers in use in Savannah in the 19th century.
In short, both Dean and Gaillet are studying Georgia decorative arts with the same zeal and focus as Chesnut has, following in her dedicated footsteps. We know that future recipients of the award will do the same, and we are excited to work with them.
Authored by:
Hillary Brown
