Period Rooms – Fact or Fiction
Daniëlle Kisluk-Grosheide, Curator of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Abstract

In many museums, period rooms are the favored destination of countless visitors. However, removed from their original setting, are these interiors reconstructions or perhaps more broadly conceived as evocations of what they once were? The art critic Ken Johnson once referred to period rooms in The New York Times as “Part time machine, part Masterpiece Theater … a paradoxical museum animal.” In her lecture, Danielle Kisluk-Grosheide invites us to take another look.

About Daniëlle Kisluk-Grosheide

Daniëlle Kisluk-Grosheide is the Henry R. Kravis Curator, in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She is a graduate of the Free University of Amsterdam and of Leiden University with a specialization in the decorative arts. She is responsible for the collections of French decorative arts and period rooms at The Met and has lectured and written extensively on various aspects of the European decorative arts.