Decorative Arts of the Gulf South

Decorative Arts of the Gulf South began as the Classical Institute of the South (CIS), an independent project founded in 2011 by New Orleans attorney Paul Haygood. HNOC incorporated CIS into its mission in 2016, establishing the Paul M. Haygood Fund to honor the memory of CIS’s founder and to enable future field survey work. In 2021, the project rebranded as DAGS.

HNOC’s 2021 exhibition Pieces of History: Ten Years of Decorative Arts Fieldwork highlighted findings from DAGS’s first decade. Pieces of History appeared with additional artifacts at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in early 2022, and in a condensed panel version at the Historic Natchez Foundation.

Past Fieldwork Sites

Louisiana: Franklin, New Iberia, New Orleans, St. Francisville
Mississippi: Columbus, Natchez, Port Gibson, Woodville
Alabama: Camden, Demopolis, Huntsville, Montgomery

Most objects in the DAGS database were either made by enslaved people of African or Native American ancestry or purchased with money made through the brutal system of enslaved labor. By 1860, nearly two million people were enslaved in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Gulf South plantations were elegant homes for wealthy slave owners, but for the people they enslaved, plantations represented captivity, torture, sexual assault, and family separation. DAGS explores the material culture of the world that both people in bondage and their white enslavers shaped. 

Enslaved people’s possessions are rare finds today, but the tools they used and furnishings they crafted remain evidence of their lives and labor. Many utilitarian objects on plantations were created on-site by enslaved blacksmiths, coopers, and carpenters, whose knowledge and abilities were highly valued. Their hands built the Gulf South, and we seek out their stories in archival records and in the objects they left behind.

Learn more in this recording of the DAGS virtual roundtable discussion “Documenting Black Material Culture,” featuring Black Craftspeople Digital Archive founder Dr. Tiffany Momon in conversation with Dr. Tara Dudley of the University of Texas at Austin and Joseph McGill Jr., founder and director of the Slave Dwelling Project.

The DAGS internship is a proven resume-building opportunity for students and young professionals entering the decorative arts field. Past participants now work as curators, educators, appraisers, and independent contractors at many esteemed institutions, including Mount Vernon, Colonial Williamsburg, the New York Yacht Club, the Museum of the American Revolution, the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, and The Historic New Orleans Collection.

DAGS is assisted by an advisory committee of decorative arts curators and scholars in New Orleans and beyond.