David Revere McFadden
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David Revere McFadden is Chief Curator and Vice President for Programs and Collections at the Museum of Arts & Design in New York City, and current President of the International Council of Museums’ Decorative Arts and Design Committee. He served for two years as Executive Director of the Millicent Rogers Museum of Northern New Mexico in Taos. From 1978 to 1995, McFadden served as Curator of Decorative Arts and Assistant Director for Collections and Research at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution. McFadden did his undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Minnesota, and received his graduate degree in the History of Art (Renaissance and Baroque Studies), with a secondary major in Chinese history.
McFadden has organized more than one hundred exhibitions on decorative arts, design and craft, covering developments from the ancient world to the present day. Exhibitions highlighting important and sometimes overlooked areas of design include tiles, keys and locks, pottery and porcelain, glass and silver. Most of these exhibitions were accompanied by illustrated handbooks. Thematic exhibitions curated by McFadden include Wine: Celebration and Ceremony, which studied the social and material culture of wine throughout history; L’Art de Vivre: Decorative Arts and Design In France 1789-1989, organized an official manifestation of the bicentennial of the French Revolution, Scandinavian Modern 1880-1980, the first American exhibition to survey modern design from all five Nordic countries; Hair, a landmark exploration of the visual and design history of human hair; Toward Modern Design: Revival and Reform in Applied Arts 1880-1920; Good Offices and Beyond: The Evolution of the Workplace, a survey of designs for the office in the twentieth century; and Structure and Style: Modernism in Dutch Applied Arts 1880-1930, the first American exhibition devoted to Dutch applied arts from that half century. McFadden’s other exhibitions have included such diverse subjects as eighteenth-century European porcelains, English Majolica of the nineteenth century, puppets, American art pottery, and Hungarian jewelry and silver, Art Nouveau ceramics, contemporary art quilts, and jewelry.
McFadden has published more than 90 books, articles, catalogues, and reviews worldwide, and has delivered more than 200 lectures and papers to national and international audiences. He has spoken at such cultural institutions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Ecole du Louvre in Paris. He has served on many international panels and juries, and on professional, civic, governmental, and advisory boards, most notably: The Arts Advisory Board of the American Federation of Arts; the Committee for the Restoration of Gracie Mansion, New York City’s Mayoral Residence; the Exhibition Committee of the American-Scandinavian Foundation; and is a member of the Steering Committee of the Smithsonian Institution’s Material Culture Forum
For his work in cultural affairs, McFadden has been named Knight, First Class, of the Order of the Lion of Finland (1984); Knight Commander of the Order of the Polar Star of Sweden by King Gustaf VI (1988); and Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Republic of France (1989). Most recently, McFadden has received the Presidential Design Award for Excellence three times (1994, 1995, and 1997).
