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Our New Associate Curator
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FORWARD:
Historic New England’s new associate curator, Erica Lome, joined the organization in March. Team Leader for Collection Services Julie Solz interviewed Erica about her background, why she is excited about joining the Historic New England team, and her thoughts on building a new collecting plan for the organization.
Julie Solz: Can you share a bit about how you became interested in American and New England material culture?
Erica Lome: I grew up in western Massachusetts and my first job was as a historic interpreter at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s home in Lenox. Looking back, what drew me to this profession was the experience of showing Wharton’s home to visitors. Everyone knew her as an author, but then people got to know her better as a human, as an individual, by seeing how she lived.
I studied art history at Bard College in New York and in my final semester I took a class on design history that met at several of the great mansions along the Hudson River Valley. Of course, the opulence of it all thrilled me, but so did the work of researching and interpreting the beautiful objects that adorned these spaces. I wanted to keep going and that led me to seek a master’s in decorative arts, design history, and material culture at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City.
My graduate work focused on the Colonial Revival movement that began in the late nineteenth century, when colonial-era objects
Associate Curator Erica Lome at the Historic New England Study Center for Preservation and Collections with paintings from the recent exhibition Artful Stories.
Building a collection that can inspire discussion, debate, and hopefully acquire artifacts and works of art from members of more of the communities we share space with throughout New England—that is what I am most excited about. I also anticipate the intellectual challenge of reassessing our existing collections so we can extract unfamiliar narratives from familiar objects.
became prized and valued not only for their aesthetic quality but also for their ties to historical events and people, which transformed them into antiques and patriotic symbols. I became interested in the people working behind the scenes to make this happen, in particular the European immigrants restoring and reproducing old furniture and developing a trade in antiques. I was fascinated at how prolific their participation was in that movement, especially during a period of great nativism and discrimination against outsiders. I began to ask myself what role material culture plays in how we express belonging to a community or country.
This work led me to the American Civilization Program at the University of Delaware for my doctoral degree. I did graduate assistantships at the Boston Furniture Archive, Nemours Estate, and Winterthur Museum. After I received my doctorate, I went to the Concord Museum in Concord, Massachusetts, for a two-year curatorial internship sponsored by the Decorative Arts Trust. I came in right at the beginning stages of a multiyear project to redesign, reinstall, and reinterpret the museum’s permanent galleries. This also involved surveying the collection to determine how we could better represent the lives and experiences of individuals not typically centered in Concord’s historic record, culminating in a new and more inclusive interpretation of well-known events, such as the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775.
JS: What excites you about joining the Historic New England team?
EL: I love this organization and have long used its resources for my research. What fascinates me is that Historic New England is itself a project of the Colonial Revival movement, founded in 1910 to document, collect, and preserve select aspects of New England’s changing cultural and material landscape. I am excited to join my new colleagues in reassessing that history to better understand who and what is missing from the stories we tell visitors.
JS: Historic New England is working on the development of a new collecting plan that is committed to telling stories that better reflect the region’s diversity. What do you think is particularly exciting about this project?
EL: This project is all about community engagement and bringing stakeholders into the museum world who are not traditionally of the museum world. Building a collection that can inspire discussion, debate, and hopefully acquire artifacts and works of art from members of more of the communities we share space with throughout New England—that is what I am most excited about. I also anticipate the intellectual challenge of reassessing our existing collections so we can extract unfamiliar narratives from familiar objects.
JS: Part of the collecting plan will include seeking new acquisitions that reflect a sense of place and identity and foster greater social consciousness about the region’s past, present, and future. What are your thoughts about shaping the collections?
EL: I think we are on the right track in first identifying who is currently represented in our collections and who is not. Some of the major areas where we can improve are in documenting the lives and labor of New Englanders of color as well as peoples who migrated to New England throughout its history, including the present. Another untapped area I am particularly interested in is domestic religious life in New England. Private, devotional material culture says so much about ethnic identity, cultural values, language, and gender.
