Michael Diaz-Griffith treks to Colonial Williamsburg to talk with chief curator Ron Hurst about a new exhibition, "British Masterworks," in which objects like gilded chandeliers, a colossal Chippendale bookcase, and an armchair upholstered with a parrot and a basket of fruit—collected by curators in the early twentieth century to flesh out their conception of 1700s Williamsburg—tell very different stories today from the ones they were bought to support.

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