Tag: Arts

America’s First Christmas Cards (episode 316)

Have you ever wondered where the tradition of sending Christmas cards every year came from?  While the first Christmas cards appeared in Britain back in the 1840s, it was a German immigrant named Louis Prang who made them popular in the United States and around the world.  Using a revolutionary new color printing technique that he called chromolithography, Prang’s Roxbury factory made the most popular greeting cards in the country from the 1870s until the turn of the century. 


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The Importance of Being Furnished, with Tripp Evans and Erica Lome (episode 308)

This week, Erica Lome and Tripp Evans join the show to discuss a new exhibit at the Eustis Estate called “The Importance of Being Furnished.”  In the wake of Oscar Wilde’s 1882 lecture tour focusing on The House Beautiful, outlandishly decorated bachelor households became an aspirational style that helped define American homes from the Gilded Age to the Jazz Era.  The new Aesthetic Movement brought beauty and artistic sensibility to American homes, replacing conservative styles that reinforced traditional morality.  “The Importance of Being Furnished” introduces four decorators who helped revolutionize interior design during this period: Charles Gibson, Ogden Codman, Charles Pendleton, and Henry Sleeper, as well as their homes in Boston’s Back Bay, Gloucester, Lincoln, and Providence.  In their own time, all four men were known as bachelor aesthetes, born into privileged families but hiding their queerness to greater or lesser degrees in an era when homosexuality was punishable by jail time in Boston.  In this interview, exhibit curators Tripp Evans and Erica Lome will tell us how these men took inspiration from their personal lives in decorating their own homes, and how they leveraged those lavish homes into careers in decorating for everyone from robber barons to Hollywood stars.


Continue reading The Importance of Being Furnished, with Tripp Evans and Erica Lome (episode 308)

Revolution’s Edge, with Patrick Gabridge and Nikki Stewart (episode 276)

The new play “Revolution’s Edge” will debut at Old North Church in June 2023.  It tells the story of three Bostonians and their families on the eve of the Revolution.  Mather Byles is the Loyalist rector of Old North Church, Cato is an African American man who’s enslaved by Byles, and John Pulling is a whiggish ship’s captain and member of the Old North vestry.  The three men have very different stations in life, but they all have young families with intertwined lives, and on April 18, 1775, they all had very different decisions to make about those lives.  My guests this week are Patrick Gabridge, producing artistic director of the Plays in Place theater company, and Nikki Stewart, executive director of Old North Illuminated.  Together, they’ll tell us how this, um, revolutionary new drama came to be.


Continue reading Revolution’s Edge, with Patrick Gabridge and Nikki Stewart (episode 276)

The Gettysburg Cyclorama: Mystery of the South End (episode 270)

Starting in 1884, audiences of veterans, schoolchildren, and everyday Bostonians streamed into a cavernous, castle-like building on Tremont Street in the South End to witness the closest thing to virtual reality that existed at the time.  The building still exists, though a series of renovations have rendered it much more ordinary and less palatial than it was back then.  The painting still exists too, and it still offers an immersive experience for visitors that blends reality and art, but not in Boston anymore.  The building was known as the Cyclorama, and it was purpose built to hold the painting, which was also known as the cyclorama, one of the most audacious artistic endeavors of the 19th century.  Together, they commemorated the turning point of the bloody Civil War that had ended two decades earlier.  


Continue reading The Gettysburg Cyclorama: Mystery of the South End (episode 270)

He Takes Faces at the Lowest Rates (episode 229)

In 1773, an ad appeared in the Boston Gazette for a Black artist who was described as possessing an “extraordinary genius” for painting portraits.  From this brief mention, we will explore the life of a gifted visual artist who was enslaved in Boston, his friendship with Phillis Wheatley, the enslaved poet, and the mental gymnastics that were required on the part of white enslavers to justify owning people like property.  Through the life of a second gifted painter, we’ll find out how the coming of the American Revolution changed life for some enslaved African Americans in Boston.  And through the unanswered questions about the lives of both these men, we’ll examine the limits of what historical sources can tell us about any given enslaved individual.  


Continue reading He Takes Faces at the Lowest Rates (episode 229)

The Little Glass Treasure House (episode 125)

Artist and author Julia Glatfelter joins us this week to discuss her upcoming children’s book The Little Glass Treasure House. The Children’s Art Centre was incorporated in 1914 under the direction of FitzRoy Carrington, curator of prints at the Museum of Fine Arts. When the building was completed in 1918 on Rutland Street in Boston’s South End, it became the first art museum for children in the world. In 1959, the organization merged with 4 settlement houses to become United South End Settlements (USES). Julia taught at the Children’s Art Centre as part of the vacation arts program at USES in 2017, and during that time, she researched the history of the building, the evolution of its programs, and the people who brought the space to life. Her new book, The Little Glass Treasure House, narrates this story through the eyes of Charlotte Dempsey, who directed the center from 1930 to 1971.


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Episode 35: The Boston Symphony Orchestra in World War I

With a partial “Muslim Ban” in place, it’s important to remember that vilifying “enemy aliens” is one of the darkest chapters of our nation’s history.  A hundred years ago, Americans were all too willing to imprison or even deport their neighbors of German descent.  Here in Boston, the preeminent director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra was affected, along with almost a third of the orchestra’s musicians.

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