Marie-Laure Buku Pongo

Marie-Laure Buku Pongo, Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts, invites us behind the scenes of the installation of the Frick’s new second-floor ceramics gallery. The room will showcase mostly pieces of eighteenth-century French faience—a major gift from the collection of Sidney R. Knafel—and will complement two other spaces within the museum’s renovated home, displaying gifts of Meissen porcelain from Henry H. Arnhold and Du Paquier porcelain from the Melinda and Paul Sullivan Collection.

Marie-Laure Buku Pongo, Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts, joins Curator Aimee Ng to investigate two cross-cultural cabinets from the 1760s. The pair of cabinets combines French materials and craft with elements made a century earlier and oceans away—eight sumptuous black-and-gold lacquer panels taken from imported Japanese objects. A traditional Asian art form, lacquerware was made through a time-consuming and dangerous process, and the mysteries that Japan held in Europe enhanced the material’s popularity in fashionable French furniture.