DETROIT, MICH.- The Detroit Institute of Arts announced today that Benjamin Colman, a specialist in American decorative arts and design, has been hired as associate curator of American art. Colman, who comes to the DIA from the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, begins his new job on Nov. 16.

“We’re so pleased that Ben will be joining our curatorial staff,” said Salvador Salort-Pons, DIA director. “The DIA has one of the top American art collections in the country, and Ben’s experience and expertise will serve it well. We look forward to welcoming him next month.”

Colman, a native of Albany, New York, has a bachelor’s degree in art history from Yale University, where he later served as the Marcia Brady Tucker Curatorial Fellow in the Department of American Decorative Arts at the Yale University Art Gallery. During his time at the gallery he worked with curator Patricia Kane on a landmark study of furniture making in colonial Rhode Island that identified hundreds of previously unknown artisans and documented thousands of pieces of historic furniture in public and private collections around the country. This project culminated in an internet database called the Rhode Island Furniture Archive (http://rifa.art.yale.edu).

Colman earned a master of arts degree through the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware. His research there looked at the histories of 17th-century relics in Plymouth, Massachusetts, as a means of examining the ways communities use antique objects to record and narrate their past.

At the Florence Griswold Museum, Colman worked with a collection of American art spanning the colonial period to the present day that is best known for its Impressionist paintings. He curated exhibitions of American furniture (“Thistles and Crowns: The Painted Chests of the Connecticut Shore,” 2014), folk art (“Art of the Everyman: American Folk Art from the Fenimore Art Museum,” 2014), modernism (“Harry Holtzman and American Abstraction,” 2013), Impressionist painting (“Lyme Artists Abroad,” 2014), marine painting (“All the Sea Knows: Marine Art from the Museum of the City of New York,” 2015), studio craft (“Kari Russell-Pool: Self-Portraits in Glass,” 2014) and contemporary art (“Animal/Vegetable/Mineral,” 2013; “Peter Halley: Big Paintings,” 2015). He is the author of numerous exhibition catalogues and articles on the history of American art and decorative arts.

His early projects at the DIA include a survey of the museum’s American furniture collection, working with conservation staff to conserve and reupholster three important 19th-century American chairs and developing ideas for temporary exhibitions.