Curatorial Walkthrough: The Clamor of Ornament

Explore The Clamor of Ornament with the exhibition’s co-curators, Margaret-Anne Logan and Duncan Tomlin.

Bringing together more than 200 objects produced over the past five centuries, The Clamor of Ornament: Exchange, Power, and Joy from the Fifteenth Century to the Present explores ornament in architecture, art, and design through the lens of drawing. The exhibition foregrounds ornament’s potential as a mode of communication, a form of currency, and a means of exchange across geographies and cultures. The Clamor of Ornament seeks to address the multilayered complexity of the history of ornament, including the dissonance between the unequal and destructive relationships that mediate its movement between sources. Together, the objects on view both celebrate and interrogate ornament’s fluidity by making connections between motifs, methods, and intentions.

Margaret-Anne Logan is an art historian and museum professional based in New York City. She earned her MA in the History of Art from The Courtauld Institute of Art in 2017 and was recognized with the Director’s Award for an Outstanding Dissertation. Her specialization is eighteenth-century French art and material culture. She graduated magna cum laude from Trinity College with a BA in Art History and minors in French, French Studies, and Creative Writing.

Duncan Tomlin is a New York City-based curatorial researcher and art historian. In 2017, Tomlin received his MA degree from The Courtauld Institute of Art, where he focused on Spanish medieval visual culture. More recently, he has worked as a research assistant on a variety of academic and curatorial projects. Tomlin co-curated The Drawing Center’s 2019–20 exhibition, The Pencil Is a Key: Drawings by Incarcerated Artists, and contributed to the exhibition catalog. He is currently pursuing his M.Arch and M.S. CCCP degrees at Columbia University’s GSAPP.