Berry Perkins: Decorative Arts & Design Curatorial Assistant, High Museum of Art, AtlantaBerry Chaney Lowden Perkins, great-great niece of Martha Berry (descended from Martha's brother Thomas), was born in 1980 in Rome, Georgia, where she graduated from Darlington School before attending Washington and Lee University. After playing basketball for the Lady Generals and graduating from W&L with a degree in Art History, she spent a year in London studying the decorative arts with Christie's Education. In 2008, Berry accepted a position in the Decorative Arts and Design curatorial department at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, an institution that claims a long history with the Berry Family.
The tragic 1962 Atlanta Art Association crash at Orly Field that claimed the lives of 106 Atlanta art patrons sadly included Randolph Berry (Martha Berry's nephew) and his wife Anne Black Berry, and Anne's sister-in-law Lydia Black. A happier connection between the Berry Family and the High Museum is Virginia Campbell Courts, daughter of Martha Berry's sister Laura. Virginia loved the decorative arts and was a long term, dedicated benefactor of the Decorative Arts department and the High, making Berry's current position in the same department all the more apropos.
Berry has helped research and organize many exhibitions in her time at the High, including 2010's The Allure of the Automobile, 2011's Modern by Design in partnership with The Museum of Modern Art New York, and the currently exhibited Gogo: Nature Transformed.
April 2013