"History Detective" Elyse Luray visits Nashville: calling all collectors!

I got to meet one of my brainy celebrity crushes last night at Belmont University: Elyse Luray, art historian, auctioneer/appraiser & co-presenter of the informative & inspiring PBS series "History Detectives," among other television programs. Speaking at Yankee warp-speed in her trademark high black leather boots & long dress, she delivered a lecture about collecting art & antiques while offering reminiscences of her work with such icons as cartoonist Chuck Jones & filmmaker George Lucas. A native of Baltimore & an alumna of Tulane University (Class of '89), Luray rose to prominence at Christie's Auction House. She is an expert on Native-American art, arms & armor as well as collectible pop-culture & Old-West Americana.

Ms. Luray offered a several cogent tips for collectors:
* Collect items that inspire your passion, not mere investments.
* Narrow the focus of your collection so that it has a theme & a manageable scope.
* Do research using primary resources, specialty books & auction catalogs; Google might suggest some directions, but it cannot substitute for genuine investigation.
* Avoid restored objects, "multiples" (most prints & photos) & online auctions.
* Understand the difference between fair-market value (willing buyer meets flexible seller, e.g. at auction) & replacement (i.e. retail/insurance) value.
* Gather & keep any documentation about the object - proper provenance adds value.
* Paper studies (e.g. designs, sketches, storyboards & scripts) for later works are becoming rarer in this computerized era & may therefore have greater value in future.
* Never make a major purchase without getting a warranty (i.e. a money-back guarantee if the object proves to be inauthentic) from the dealer or seller.

Before a brief Q & A session, the audience was treated to a 16-minute story from "History Detectives" in which Ms. Luray traces a group of paintings by Thelma Johnson Streat, who was among the 40,000 artists (including dancers, writers, actors & singers) employed by the WPA's federal arts projects (1935-43) & the first African-American woman to have her own work bought by the Museum of Modern Art. She was able to find a rare letter by Diego Rivera extolling Streat's talent as well as a government film & document proving that Streat worked on a massive 1940 "Union-of-Americas" mural, now on display at the City College of San Francisco. The gratitude expressed by the paintings' current owner, a niece of Ms. Streat in Oregon, made Luray's cross-country travel & archival research worthwhile. If you are interested in either U.S. history or collectible art & antiques, I urge you to check out the very entertaining "History Detectives" (episodes available at www.pbs.org). It even has a groovy theme: Elvis Costello's "Watching the Detectives" (1977).

Among the small exhibition of 19th-century decorative arts, presented under the rubric "American Experience" at Belmont's Leu Gallery (its opening was the tie-in for Ms. Luray's campus visit), I was moved by the needlepoint samplers on silk & linen (c. 1840). The moral & religious verses stitched onto those faded folksy handkerchief-sized fabrics were less interesting than the fact that such products of the domestic arts gave women a rare expressive outlet at a time when they were excluded from participating in our so-called democracy. The women & girls who made them often added their names, ages & dates - as if to say "I matter too in this world run by men."