MMofA: ART TALK: On Thomas Day with Jerome Bias
Date/Time
Date(s) - May 9, 2024
6:30 pm - 7:30 pm
Location
Mobile Museum of Art
Categories
Join MMofA for a talk and demonstration by North Carolina woodworker Jerome Bias to celebrate the Columbia Museum of Art’s Bureau (about 1855), made by Thomas Day (American, 1801–1861), who was a free Black cabinetmaker in the face of restrictive conditions in the pre-Civil War era.
A self-taught woodworker, Bias has been making period furnishings and studying Southern decorative arts for more than 20 years, using the work of Day as well as often-unnamed enslaved individuals as inspiration. He has worked and presented in Old Salem Museums and Gardens and Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, and most recently served as artist-in-residence at Belle Grove Plantation. Bias exclusively uses hand tools to create wooden furniture as a way of better understanding the experiences of his enslaved ancestors. In explaining the work of Day, Bias showcases the tools he uses today and demonstrates the kinds of techniques that Day himself would have used more than 150 years ago.
The exhibition runs from April 11 through August 11, 2024, and is part of our multi-year exhibition program SPOTLIGHT. This is one in a series of American art exhibitions created through a multi-year, multi-institutional partnership formed by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art as part of the Art Bridges Cohort Program.