The Georgia Museum of Art has announced its new adjunct curator of decorative arts, Dale L. Couch. Couch will direct the museum’s Henry D. Green Center for the Study of the Decorative Arts.

he Green Center was founded in 2000 and organizes exhibitions, publications and educational programs that focus on the decorative arts and material culture of Georgia, reaching audiences throughout the Southeast and beyond.

Couch’s first duty at the Georgia Museum of Art will be to present the fifth biennial Henry D. Green Symposium of the Decorative Arts, “Neighboring Voices: The Decorative Culture of Our Southern Cousins,” at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education on Jan. 29-30. Couch will design the installation of the permanent collection of decorative arts in the museum’s new gallery wing and formalize the Henry D. Green Center within the new GMOA humanities research facility, both opening in early 2011.

He will develop a major survey exhibition and catalogue of the decorative arts in Georgia, circa 1750-2000, and will oversee the growth of the collection of decorative arts with an emphasis on works made in Georgia, the South and the United States.

“With Dale Couch as our new curator of decorative arts, we look forward to the Green Center attaining even higher levels of success. Mr. Couch has years of experience in the field and, thus, is extremely knowledgeable about the material culture of Georgia and the South, but, even more important, he is enthusiastic and engaged in research and dissemination of that knowledge,” said William U. Eiland, GMOA director

Couch holds a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of South Carolina, where he also pursued graduate work in art history. He is a graduate of the Archives Institute at Emory University; the Institute for Southern Material Culture at the University of North Carolina/Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts; and completed additional graduate course work at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

For 25 years he was the senior reference archivist of the Georgia Archives, where, on many occasions, he assisted researchers for exhibitions at the High Museum of Art, the Atlanta Historical Society and the Georgia Museum of Art, among other institutions.

- UGA News Service