Georgia Museum of Art | Info

Ashley Callahan
Curator of the Henry D. Green Center for the Study of the Decorative Arts

Ashley Callahan received her B.A., magna cum laude, from The University of the South, and her M.A., with honors, from the Masters Program in the History of American Decorative Arts offered jointly by the Parsons School of Design and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution.

She has curated numerous original exhibitions at the Georgia Museum of Art including From Sideboard to Pulpit: Silver in Georgia, Earl McCutchen: Craftsmanship in Ceramics and Glass and The Arts and Crafts Movement in North Georgia. Her exhibition Enchanting Modern: Ilonka Karasz was named the Museum Exhibition of the Year for 2004 by the Georgia Association of Museums and Galleries, and the accompanying publication received an honorable mention award in the American Association of Museum Publications Design Competition.

Also at the museum, she oversees the biennial Henry D. Green Symposium of the Decorative Arts and serves as adjunct faculty in the Interior Design Department at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. She has contributed articles to the Archives of American Art Journal, Newsletter of the Decorative Arts Society, the proceedings of the Textile Society of America's 2002, 2000, and 1998 symposia and Studies in the Decorative Arts.

She has presented at numerous symposia and conferences including American Modernist Design 1920-1940: New Perspectives at Yale University, the College Art Association Conference, the Southeastern Museum Conference, the Georgia Association of Museums and Galleries Conference, the Textile Society of American Symposia and the Society of Architectural Historians Meeting. She is a member of the Decorative Arts Society, Inc., the Society for Commercial Archeology, and the Textile Society of America, for which she has served on the Board of Directors since 2002.

Before taking the position as the first curator of decorative arts at the Georgia Museum of Art in 2000, Callahan interned at The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution; the Horticultural Services Division, Smithsonian Institution; Historic Deerfield, Inc.; The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens; and for two years at Cranbrook Art Museum.

Email her at adbrown@uga.edu.