In this week’s episode of our Curious Objects podcast, host Benjamin Miller speaks with Annamarie Sandecki, who describes herself as the “semi-retired former director” of the Tiffany Archives, and Medill Higgins Harvey, curator of American decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On the light table are a curiously shaped creamer and equally curious sugar bowl, the first in the shape of a frog and the second shaped like a pufferfish. Both were made by Tiffany under the aegis of design director Edward C. Moore, whose personal collection of decorative arts objects from around the world served as an inspiration to Tiffany in the later 1800s, and is the subject of a current exhibition at the Met,Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany and Co.
Medill Harvey is the Ruth Bigelow Wriston Curator of American Decorative Arts and Manager of the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She oversees the collections of American silver, jewelry, and other metalwork, as well as mid-nineteenth-century furniture. Medill joined the staff of the American Wing to direct research for the exhibition Art and The Empire City (2000). She contributed to the Met’s 2011 and 2009 reinstallations of the American silver and jewelry collections, and is co-author and served as a consulting curator for Modern Gothic: The Inventive Furniture of Kimbel and Cabus, 1863-82 (2021), an exhibition and catalogue produced by the Brooklyn Museum. Her most recent publication is Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany and Co. (2021).
Annamarie V. Sandecki was the director of the Tiffany and Company Archives and Heritage Collection. For thirty years she was tasked with acquiring vintage Tiffany jewelry, watches, silver hollowware, and objets d’art for the company’s own collection, and the resulting assemblage of several thousand museum-quality pieces is universally recognized as the world’s most important group of luxury objects by America’s most iconic jeweler. Most recently she was the co-curator of the 2022 exhibition Vision and Virtuosity at the Saatchi Gallery in London. Her recent publications include Nineteenth Century Jewellery in Currier and Ives Prints; Women in Nineteenth-Century Tiffany and Co. Japanesque-Style Designs; and object essays in Collecting Inspiration, Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co. Annamarie is currently an expert researcher for the International Antique Jewelers’ Association, a freelance curator, and a frequent guest lecturer.
