Decorative Arts — The Newark Museum of Art

The Decorative Arts collection encompasses more than 55,600 objects from Europe, the Americas, and across the globe.

These artworks and objects of daily life span the 16th-century to the present and include examples of ceramics, furniture, glass, jewelry, silver, textiles, and other materials. Luxurious or ordinary, hand-crafted or mass-produced, decorative or functional—each reveals multifaceted stories of the people who made and used them. The largest collection object, the 1885 Ballantine House, showcases the Decorative Arts collection in its period rooms and galleries. Other collections on view include art pottery, studio crafts, American silver, and jewelry.

Decorative Arts Highlights

Repertoire by Molly Hatch
Innovators in Southwestern Jewelry
Contemporary Craft: A Newark Museum of Art Sampler
Unexpected Color: A Journey Through Glass
Seeing America: 18th & 19th Centuries
Seeing America: 20th & 21st Centuries
The Ballantine House
Includes:
– Introduction Galleries, includes The Ballantine House and Made In Newark/Listening Lounge
– Historical Rooms
– Stay: The Black Women of 19th-Century Newark
– G.O.A.T. The Art Game
– Jewelry: From Pearls to Platinum to Plastic

A. J. Hedges and Company, Moth brooch, 1895‑1905. Gold, enamel, opal, demantoid garnet, diamond, 1 x 2 1/8 in. (2.5 x 5.4 cm). Purchase 2009 Estate of Ellen Keely Hunnikin | 2009.5.1

Diego Romero (Cochiti), Meso‑American Big Mac Pyramid, 2005. Earthenware, slip, pigment, 8 x 16 in. (20.3 x 40.6 cm). Purchase 2006 Friends of the Decorative Arts | 2006.6. © Diego Romero

Tony Whitfield, Spoleto table, 1995. Mahogany, cherry, birch, polyurethane paint, 30 1/8 x 45 1/4 x 40 in. (76.5 x 114.9 x 101.6 cm). Purchase 1995 Emma Fantone Endowment Fund | 95.99 © Tony Whitfield

Myer Myers and Benjamin Halstead, Coffee Pot, 1763‑65. Silver, wood, 11 x 8 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. (27.9 x 21.6 x 14 cm). Purchase 2016 Mr. and Mrs. William V. Griffin Fund | 2016.7

Art Smith, Bracelet, 1955. Copper, brass, 4 1/8 x 2 5/8 x 2 5/8 in. (10.5 x 6.7 x 6.7 cm). Gift of Beth Green Olesky in Memory of Hortense Kessler Green, 2014 | 2014.30

Toots Zynsky, Tierra del Fuego, 1989. Glass, 5 1/8 x 11 1/4 x 7 1/4 in. (13 x 28.6 x 18.4 cm). Purchase 1990 Thomas L. Raymond Bequest Fund | 90.5. © Toots Zynsky