FEATURED SPEAKERS

Featured Speaker: Charles Faudree

For over 35 years. Charles Faudree has been synonymous with French Country style. The noted interior designer's work often appears in Veranda, House Beautiful, Southern Living, Traditional Home, Southern Accents, Renovation Style, Country Living and House & Garden. Faudree's style can be further explored in his books, Country French Florals & Interiors, Country French Living, French Country Signature and his latest release, Charles Faudree Interiors. He will share his principles of design that make a house a Country French home.

Featured Speaker: Sumpter Priddy

Sumpter Priddy is one of the foremost dealers and scholars on Southern American Furniture. He holds an undergraduate degree in the History of Architecture from the University of Virginia and a Masters from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture. He served as Tutor for Historic Deerfield’s Summer Fellowship Program (1976), Curator of Exhibition Buildings and Teaching Curator for The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (1978-1983), and for a quarter century has pursued his interest in early Americana from his gallery in Alexandria, Virginia, where he consults for collectors and museums.

He lectures frequently and contributed frequently to professional journals. His book American Fancy, Exuberance in the Arts, 1790-1840 was published by the Chipstone Foundation in conjunction with an exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum of Salem and the Maryland Historical Society. It won Historic New England’s 2004 Book Prize for its “valuable contribution to the study of early American and New England Culture.”

Rebecca Hunt

Rebecca Hunt is one of the most well-respected risk managers in personal insurance for the high-net-worth with specific expertise in historic and high-value homes. She has over twenty years experience in documenting, evaluating and providing preservation and loss prevention solutions for historic structures and art collections. Her educational background includes a MS in Historic Preservation from the University of Pennsylvania, a BA in Art History from Dickinson College, and completion of the Winter Institute Program in American Decorative Arts at the Winterthur Museum.

Marianne Ramsey

Marianne Ramsey teaches courses in interior design studio and historic design at Eastern Kentucky University. Her research on early Kentucky furniture and cabinetmakers, conducted with independent scholar Clifton Anderson, has resulted in numerous exhibitions, publications, and presentations. Their most recent research efforts culminated in exhibitions on sugar chests at the Speed Art Museum and vernacular seating furniture at Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill. Marianne received a BA and MA from the University of Kentucky.

John Michler

John Michler is a fourth-generation horticulturist who has been installing flower gardens for thirty years in the Bluegrass area of Central Kentucky. Winner of two awards from the Perennial Plant Association,
John enjoys combining sustainable plantings with innovative naturalistic designs, using a wide variety
of native and textural perennial plants. His century old Michler’s Florist and Greenhouses is located in the historic Aylesford neighborhood in Lexington. It is a mecca for lovers of nature and gardening.

Estill C. Pennington

Estill C. Pennington, a graduate of the University of Kentucky, has been actively involved in the study of painting in the South for the past thirty years. He has served in curatorial capacities for the Archives of American Art, the National Portrait Gallery, the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and as founding curator of the Morris Museum of Art’s Southern collection. Estill’s publications include William Edward West, Kentucky Painter, Look Away, Downriver: currents of style in Louisiana art 1800-1950, and A Southern Collection. His most recent publication, Kentucky: the master painters, was recognized by the Kentucky Historical Society with an award of merit. Lessons in Likeness: the portrait painter in Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley 1800-1920 is scheduled for publication by the University Press of Kentucky. He lives in his native Bourbon County at Ridge Cottage, near the old Cane Ridge Meeting House.

Scott Erbes

Scott Erbes became The Speed Museum’s first Curator of Decorative Arts and Design in 1999. He oversees the museum’s collections of European and American decorative arts and design, Asian art, and contemporary craft. Scott has developed an active acquisition program with a particular focus on Kentucky decorative arts and late nineteenth- and twentieth-century design. Several additions to the collection have been included in Art & Antiques magazine’s annual listing of top museum acquisitions. He was project director for the exhibitions, From Folk to Modern: Kentucky Art Pottery, 1900-1950 and For Safekeeping: The Kentucky Sugar Chest, 1790-1850. Recent publications include “Living with Antiques: A Couple Collects Kentucky,” an article published in the May 2007 edition of The Magazine Antiques. Recently, Scott developed and launched the Kentucky Online Arts Resource (www.koar.org), a free online image database devoted to Kentucky’s artistic heritage. He has served as a restoration consultant for a number of Kentucky historic house museums. He also serves on the advisory board of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Josh Samples

Josh Samples creates amazing living walls, container gardens and floral arrangements. Vertical gardens or living walls are a hot new trend among environmentally aware architects, designers, and gardeners, by growing plants outdoors on the side of a building, or grown inside on a specially designed structure. Josh is a Nationally Certified Pool Operator and has been published in Signature Pools.