Made in New York: The Twenty-Seventh Annual Parsons/Cooper Hewitt Graduate Student Symposium on the History of Design, is now available to watch online. Click here to access full symposium footage.

The MA Program’s 27th annual symposium took place in April 2018 and was organized around the theme “Made in New York.” The Catherine Hoover Voorsanger Keynote address was titled “I ❤ New York: An American Furniture Historian’s Perspective” and delivered this year by Peter M. Kenny, co-President of Classical American Homes Preservation Trust and former Ruth Bigelow Wriston Curator of American Decorative Arts and Administrator of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As a historian of American furniture and interiors, much of Dr. Kenny’s work has been with New-York-based makers, including publications such as Duncan Phyfe: Master Cabinetmaker in New York (2011), Honore Lannuier, Cabinet Maker from Paris: The Life and Work of a French Ebeniste in Federal New York (1998), and American Kasten: the Dutch-Style Cupboards of New York and New Jersey, 1650-1800 (1991).

Presenting at the student sessions was the program’s own Benjamin Green, who discussed New York’s emergence as a global fashion capital in the mid twentieth-century. We also welcomed the newly-graduated Anna Rasche and Jeffery McCullough, who explored the history of the renowned jewelry firm Dreicer & Company and museum objects from the Brooklyn-based Russel sisters, respectively. In addition, students from NYU and Yale University delivered papers on subjects such as Harry Herman Roseland’s genre paintings and the making of Dutch-American merchant identity in seventeenth-century New York.