Mack Cox Presents Chairs and Household Products of the Kentucky Penitentiary, 1805-1937 and Decorative Inlay in Early Kentucky Furniture, 1792-1820

Two lectures will be presented with each running about 30 minutes. The first explores chairs that were produced at the Kentucky penitentiary in Frankfort from 1805 to 1937 and how an Italian chair influenced these Kentucky chairs from about 1815 until after the Civil War. This talk was prepared for the 2024 Furniture Conference at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in North Carolina. The second lecture documents the decorative inlay vocabulary of 42 furniture groups made in Kentucky from about 1792 to 1820. This talk was prepared for the Winterthur Museum in Delaware and the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Art in 2022. Both lectures are fast-paced, graphics-rich introductions to Kentucky furniture made before the steamboat era when the Commonwealth was commercially isolated by a wilderness and part the trans-Appalachian West.