Four new Thompson Fellows named for 2025
The spring 2025 cohort of the Thompson Fellowship includes, from left to right, Mya Rose Bailey, Steven Baltsas, Grace Billingslea, and Anne Boyd.
Author: William Richards, Ph.D.
The Jenrette Foundation is pleased to announce its newest cohort of William L. Thompson Collections Fellows, whose work and research interests range from the relationship between material culture and memory, to the cross-cultural influences on design, to multisensory anthropology, to the evolving interpretive methods of museums.
The Thompson Fellowship is a short-term residential fellowship opportunity, designed for emerging museum professionals and graduate students interested in careers related to collections and material culture within historic house museums. This spring, Anne Boyd of Boston University, Steven Baltsas of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware, May Rose Bailey of the Bard Graduate Center, and Grace Billingslea of the Brooklyn Museum will spend a week at Millford in May attending special lectures and tours, and working together on their respective projects.
“This fellowship is named for Bill Thompson to honor his role in developing the significant American decorative arts collection at the Jenrette Foundation, and it’s an important opportunity to convene emerging scholars,” says Grant Quertermous, Curator and Director of Collections for the Jenrette Foundation,” and this group will have the advantage of using Millford and the Jenrette Foundation’s collection to test their ideas and discover new pathways for their work.”
“Our founder, Dick Jenrette, believed that the decorative arts offered us the best primary evidence to help us think about our own histories,” says Benjamin Prosky, President of the Jenrette Foundation. “Welcoming another cohort in Bill Thompson’s memory helps today’s emerging scholars to harness that power and contribute to the legacy not only of Millford, but of Dick’s own passion for mentoring.”
Learn more about the Thompson Fellowship and be sure to read more about Millford. Stay tuned to the Jenrette Foundation in the coming months to hear about the Fellows, their research, and their progress.
Mya Rose Bailey (they/she) is a current graduate student at the Bard Graduate Center, completing their M.A. in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. Their master’s thesis, “A Sense of Enslavement: Experiences of Time and Sound in Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and Poplar Forest,” merges their interests in multisensory anthropology, land and soundscape design, temporality, and memory in Black communities throughout American history. They hold a B.A. in Art History from SUNY New Paltz and have expanded interpretations of Black material culture and design within the Museum of Arts and Design, Historic Huguenot Street, and alongside author Lesa Cline-Ransome.
Steven Baltsas is a Lois F. McNeil Fellow in the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware and is interested in the junction of Southern European design and race in antebellum America. His master’s thesis studies the consumption of Renaissance Revival furniture in New York, New Orleans, and Paris between 1845–1861. Steven holds a BA in Art History and English from SUNY New Paltz. As an architectural historian, he has completed survey work on architecture and ironwork in the mid-nineteenth century Hudson Valley. He continues to research builders and craftspeople working in the region during the period.
Grace Billingslea is the senior curatorial assistant for American art and arts of the Americas at the Brooklyn Museum where she most recently contributed to the development of Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art, the reinstallation of the American art galleries. In 2022, she earned her M.A. in decorative arts, design history, and material culture from Bard Graduate Center. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century American material culture and the role of museums in illuminating the artistic outputs and lived experiences of women, working class people, Black and Asian Americans, and other underrepresented groups through curation, display, and interpretation. She earned her B.A. in art history and politics from New York University. Prior to the Brooklyn Museum, Grace has worked within the curatorial departments of the American Federation of Arts and the Museum of the City of New York.
Anne Boyd is a Ph.D. Candidate in the American Studies Program at Boston University. She is interested in Civil War memory from World War II through present day, as seen through a variety of physical representations including monuments, school-naming practices, and war reenactments. Her dissertation is primarily focused on how the Lost Cause developed outside of the South, and how heritage organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy adjusted their messaging across time and space. This work sits at the intersection between history, material and visual culture, and popular memory. Anne earned her MA in American Studies from Boston University in 2022, and her BA in American Culture and Political Science from the University of Michigan in 2020.