About the Decorative Arts and Design Collection

The Cincinnati Art Museum’s decorative arts and design collection includes almost 7,000 works of art. It contains furniture, glass, ceramics, metalwork, and architectural design from North America, the UK, and Europe, made between the seventeenth century and today.

Decorative arts and design objects were among the first artworks acquired by the museum when it was founded in 1881. Initially, this collection focused on objects that museum founders felt would most inspire local makers and manufacturers, such as copies of European masterworks in metal by Elkington & Co. and exemplary British ceramics produced by Royal Worcester. Soon, the collection grew to include ceramics by the Cincinnati Pottery Club and The Rookwood Pottery and glass by Louis Comfort Tiffany, among other things. Throughout the museum’s first one hundred years, important collections of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English silver; nineteenth-century English and European ceramics, eighteenth-century French furnishings, Cincinnati furniture and metalwork; folk art; and modern and contemporary design were added. Today, we continue to build on and out from these strengths to further diversify the artists and geographical regions represented and the stories that our collection can tell.

The decorative arts and design department uses the museum’s collection to generate new scholarship presented through exhibitions, publications, and digital projects.

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About the Curator

Amy Miller Dehan, Curator of Decorative Arts and Design, joined the Cincinnati Art Museum in 2001. She holds a BA from the College of William and Mary and an MA from the University of South Carolina. Prior to Dehan’s arrival in Cincinnati, she held internships at the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is an alum of The Winterthur Fall Institute and the Attingham Summer School. In her present role, Dehan researches, displays, and continues to build the museum’s collections of American and European decorative arts dating from 1400 to the present. She has curated more than 30 exhibitions and museum collection gallery displays on subjects including Cincinnati art, contemporary craft, folk art, American silver, musical instruments, British decorative arts, American Modernism, and contemporary design. In addition to various lectures and journal articles, her most notable publications include Joseph Urban: Unlocking an Art Deco Bedroom (2022), Gorham Silver: Designing Brilliance 1850–1970 (essayist, 2019), Cincinnati Silver: 1788–1940 (2014), Outside the Ordinary: Contemporary Art in Glass, Wood, and Ceramics from the Wolf Collection (2009), and Cincinnati Art Carved Furniture and Interiors (contributor, 2003). Dehan received the Victorian Society of America’s Ruth Emery Publication Award for her scholarship on Cincinnati silver, and most recently earned the Association of Art Museum Curators’ Award for Excellence for the digital exhibition Joseph Urban: Unlocking an Art Deco Bedroom.

Dehan has served on the board of the American Ceramics Circle and currently is President of the Decorative Arts Society, Inc., a New York-based non-profit engaging museum professionals, academics, collectors, dealers, and enthusiasts in the appreciation and study of decorative arts and design from the past to the present. 

Additional Resources

Rookwood Pottery Cincinnati Silver Cincinnati Art Carved Furniture