I collaborated with the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library to create a three-part virtual tour series focused on the collection’s China Trade artifacts, a project that supplemented my conservation training in East Asian works on paper from Fall 2021 to Spring 2023. The goal of this series was to recenter these China Trade objects in H.F. DuPont’s collection within the transnational networks of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries between China and the West by offering a conservator’s approach to the understanding of these objects. In my personal experiences researching these artifacts, China Trade objects in American collections, such as those at the Winterthur Museum, were often associated with the contexts of American consumerism in the study of American material culture. This perspective disconnects these artifacts from their place of origin and consequently overlooks the creators and communities in China and all throughout Asia inseparable from the artifacts’ journeys to the United States. By unpacking the narratives associated with the China Trade objects in Winterthur’s collection from the perspectives of materials and aesthetic traditions, this virtual tour series aimed to reinterpret these artifacts, that were often discussed within a Euro-centric framework, within a global context. Moreover, with a specific focus on the Chinese wallpapers, export paintings, and tea equipage from the collection, this series explored the ways in which Chinese culture and craftsmanship were interwoven with American identity and Mr. du Pont’s desire to transform his family home into a space to share America’s diverse stories through objects.

Video Introduction to Tour Content:

I was selected to participate in the Delaware Public Humanities Institute (DELPHI) through the Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware in the summer of 2022. My work in the program centered on expanding and exploring different public outreach approaches and platforms for this tour. This is a video introduction to the tour’s content for visitors recorded during a session lead by Erickson Blakney, an award winning writer, reporter, and interviewer for Bloomberg and CBS News.