The Charleston Art and Antiques Forum celebrates thirteen years with Colonial America lecture series

The Charleston Art & Antiques Forum is coming back for its thirteenth year on Wednesday, March 17th through Sunday, March 21st, 2010.

In celebration of its thirteenth year, the Forum lecture series is entitled 'E Pluribus Unum: Thirteen Colonies, One New Nation.' Experts will examine architecture, furniture, paintings, silver, ceramics and gardens found in each geographic region of Colonial America.

Here's more from the press release:

The Keynote Address opens the Forum on March 17 and is the inaugural event of Charleston's Antiques Week. Carrie Rebora Barratt, Associate Director of Collections and Administration at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, will be giving the Keynote Address. A noted lecturer and author on American art, Dr. Barratt will present Facing the New World: American Portraiture in the Thirteen Original Colonies. The Keynote Address and the Forum lectures will be held in the historic 1845 Courtroom at the Confederate Home, 23 Chalmers Street.

"The Charleston Art & Antiques Forum stages the best fine and decorative arts program in the country today," according to Americana's distinguished scholar Wendell D. Garrett.

In addition to Carrie Rebora Barratt, the 2010 Forum speakers are: Gary J. Albert, Old Salem Museums & Gardens; Paul F. (Chip) Callaway, Callaway and Associates, Inc., landscape architects; Eleanore P. Gadsden, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Eric K. Gronning, Sotheby's New York; Ralph Harvard III, Ralph Harvard, Inc., designers; Middleton Place Foundation officials Charles Duell, Barbara, Doyle, Mary Edna Sullivan and Tracy Todd; Robert D. Mussey, Jr., Robert Mussey Associates, furniture conservators; Robert M. Prioleau, The Huguenot Society of South Carolina; Margaret B. Pritchard , Colonial Williamsburg Foundation; Katherine A. Saunders, Historic Charleston Foundation; J. Thomas Savage, Winterthur Museum and Country Estate; Jane Shadel Spillman, The Corning Museum of Glass; Matthew A. Thurlow, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Elisabeth Garrett Widmer, independent scholar and museum consultant.

This year's program will feature an afternoon visit to Middleton Place, the plantation home of patriots Henry Middleton, President of the First Continental Congress and Arthur Middleton, signer of the Declaration of Independence. Objects from the Middleton family collection, including some of which have never been seen by the public, will be examined. Optional tours highlighting Charleston's early history and hospitality will allow participants to explore bastion and drawbridge sites of the only English walled city in North America, visit several of the city's earliest private homes, and learn about the French Huguenot settlers in the country's only remaining independent Huguenot church. A private tour of the Charleston International Antiques Show with Forum Moderator J. Thomas Savage, will conclude the 2010 Forum offerings.

"I am extremely pleased to announce the hiring of The Charleston Art & Antiques Forum's first Executive Director, Courtenay L. Daniels, from Charleston who also heads Corporate Events Consulting in New York," said Founder and Chair Jean Helms. "In addition, Ralph Harvard III, antiquarian and designer, and Catherine Sweeney Singer , Executive Director of the Winter Antiques Show in New York, have both agreed to serve on our national advisory board."

Founded in 1997, The Charleston Art & Antiques Forum is a non-profit organization which benefits arts education and preservation programs in Charleston, South Carolina. The 2010 Forum is being sponsored, in part, by Charlton Hall Auctions in Columbia, SC and by Phipps Dickson Integria, a media services company based in Quebec, Canada.

Ticket packages are now available online, and the 2010 program brochure may be obtained by writing The Charleston Art & Antiques Forum; 36 Legare Street; Charleston, SC 29401 or call (800) 926-2520.