A Kentucky native, Mack Cox is a collector and an independent scholar of early Kentucky material culture. He received his BS and MS degrees in geology from Eastern Kentucky University and pursued an oil and gas career from which he retired in 2017. He and his wife, Sharon, began collecting early Kentucky material about 2005 with a focus on furniture and art. In 2011, their collection was covered in The Magazine Antiques and was described in 2013 as “one of the finest assemblages of antebellum Kentucky material.”
Mack currently serves on the Henry Clay Memorial Foundation, and on advisory boards for the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) in North Carolina, Colonial Williamsburg Art Museums, and The Magazine Antiques. He is a regional representative for MESDA’s Object Database and previously served on the collections committee for the National Society of Colonial Dames in Kentucky. He has lectured on Kentucky material, especially furniture, at numerous Kentucky locations as well as before the Decorative Arts Trust in Philadelphia, MESDA, Colonial Williamsburg, Historic Deerfield in Massachusetts, Winterthur in Delaware, and the Washington DC Decorative Arts forum.
The title of Mack Cox’s lecture is: An American Story: The Redd Family Paintings.
It is the story of the marriages, mentorship, and geography that entwined the lives of two of Kentucky’s most important artists, Matthew Harris Jouett (1788-1827) and Oliver Frazer (1808 to 1864), and their descendants, as well as the travels and adventures of the Redd family and their portraits as they moved from the first owners to the present, with the backdrop of war, financial crisis, and cultural revolution. Mack’s talk will be a fascinating story.
