A few weeks back, Curious Objects host Benjamin Miller participated in a panel discussion at the Winter Show alongside collector Jeremy Simien (former guest of the podcast) and Morgan Library and Museum curator Jesse Erickson…
Field trip: Son et Lumiere, Twenty-First-Century Style
In terms of a cultural trend, something possibly important is afoot in a spectacle titled Gustav Klimt: Gold in Motion, which recently opened in lower Manhattan at the Hall des Lumières…
An Arts and Crafts Arcadia
Whether you know him as an artist, designer, printer, and key figure of the British arts and crafts movement; or as poet, novelist, translator of ancient Icelandic sagas; or as social critic, political activist, and pioneering preservationist, William Morris is one of the most enduring figures of Victorian England…
John Craxton’s Sensuous Odyssey
John Craxton was one of those eccentric British modernists, like his friends and near contemporaries Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Ivon Hitchens, and Keith Vaughan…
Current and coming: Maya gods at the Met
In an act of vandalism on par with the burning of the Library of Alexandria, during the sixteenth century Spanish conquistadors and priests destroyed the Maya codices, or the written sum of that civilization’s history and literature…
Shadowy Figures
When Charles Scribner’s Sons decided to publish an illustrated book on hoofed mammals in 1953, it was probably not a subject with promising financial prospects—a worthy scientific treatise, perhaps, but certainly not something expected to appeal to the general public. Yet when the book appeared, its dazzling black-and-white graphics made it one of Scribner’s most appealing offerings of the year…
Current and coming: Making Icebergs at Olana
Olana—the historic estate of Hudson River school artist Frederic Edwin Church, with its faux-Persian mansion surrounded by a landscape devised by the painter as a living work of art—is hosting winter art exhibitions for the first time…
Art Deco in Jamaica
Not long after art deco design received an international showcase at the famed Paris universal exposition of 1925, inspired responses to the new style emerged in virtually every field of the applied and visual arts…
Current and coming: In Stitches at Colonial Williamsburg
Stitched in Time: American Needlework features some sixty examples of bed rugs, samplers, quilted petticoats, embroidered hand towels, crewelwork, mourning and commemorative needlework, and more.
Living with antiques: A Labor of Love
Restoring the Daniel Hiester house, an eighteenth-century Pennsylvania gem