Portland / Maine / United States
Laura Fecych Sprague, an independent museum curator, was first associated with the collections at Tate House in 1980 and has worked often on the Museums behalf in the intervening years. Tate House Museum hired her as the consulting curator in March 2010. A scholar of the material culture, the decorative arts and interiors in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Maine, Laura Sprague has published extensively, including the landmark Agreeable Situations: Society, Commerce and Art in Southern Maine, 1780-1830 (Kennebunk, Me.: The Brick Store Museum, 1987). She oversaw the 2000-2002 centennial restoration of the Wadsworth-Longfellow House at the Maine Historical Society in Portland. Henry Wadsworth Longfellows boyhood home was the first historic house open to the public in Maine in 1901. Laura Sprague also serves as consulting curator of decorative arts for the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, a post she has held since 1989. Her clients for exhibitions and publications include the Brick Store Museum Maine Historical Society, Portland Museum of Art, and Maine State Museum. She serves on the collections committees for Maine Historical Society and Victoria (Morse-Libby) Mansion. She was a public member of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission from 1997 to 2007. In 2007 she completed a research fellowship on Maine furniture at the Henry Francis DuPont Winterthur Museum and Library, presenting new research at Winterthurs Furniture Forum in April 2009 and March 2010. Tate House Museum 1267 Westbrook Street, ME 04102 Portland207.774.6177 [email protected]
