04.24.2024

WBUR: Abolitionist Harriet Hayden’s photo albums show 19th-century Black lives

Abolitionist Harriet Hayden’s photo albums show 19th-century Black lives

By Arielle Gray
Published on WBUR.com on April 24, 2024

Excerpt:

For many Black people of the diaspora, the archive can be a place of intrigue and frustration. Racism, sexism and colonialism have historically dictated who has been documented and in what ways. There are gaps in how many traditional archives record Black life. Sometimes, with luck, something is uncovered that provides depth and nuance beyond a name on a page. “Framing Freedom: The Harriet Hayden Albums,” on view at the Boston Athenaeum through June 22, does just that.

“Black history is often a part of the urban fabric, the nation’s fabric, but we don’t necessarily have evidence of those things,” says Makeda Best, who co-curated the exhibit. Through “Framing Freedom,” “we are able to visualize and materialize a sense of connection.”

This is the first major exhibition featuring the contents of two 19th-century photo albums owned by Black activist Harriet Hayden. Harriet and her husband Lewis Hayden self-emancipated from slavery in 1844 with their son Joseph and eventually made their way to Boston, where they settled in the then predominantly Black Beacon Hill neighborhood by 1849.

To read the full article on WBUR.com.

04.09.2024

Conde Nast Traveler Review: Boston Athenaeum

As part of the Conde Nast Traveler listing of 17 Best Museums in Boston. By Andrew Sessa and Elizabeth Wellington

Excerpt:

Stately repository of Boston history, this private library and event space holds more than books.

Zoom out. What’s this place all about?

Part museum, part library, and part members club, the Boston Athenaeum has welcomed bibliophiles, art lovers, and other intellectually curious types since 1805. (A drafter of the Massachusetts constitution and President John Adams’s secretary were among its founders, and members since include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.) Today, its landmarked 1849 neoclassical headquarters in Beacon Hill—which unveiled a $17 million, historically sensitive restoration, renovation, and expansion in fall 2022—welcomes its 6,000-plus card-carrying members to check books out from its stacks, and it encourages the public to come in and check out what the place is all about, too. Walk right in and buy a ticket for access to the street-level main floor’s double-height Bayard Henry Long Room, hung with paintings by the likes of John Singer Sargent and Gilbert Stuart, as well as a gallery space that shows off temporary exhibitions of art, books, manuscripts and more, plus the Children’s Library, filled with toys and games in addition to books, of course.

To read the full article in Conde Nast Traveler.

11.09.2023

Metamorphosis of the Boston Athenaeum

Published in “Traditional Building” November 9, 2023

Metamorphosis of the Boston Athenaeum
Annum Architects has breathed new life into the Boston Athenaeum’s art, books—and membership.
By J. Michael Welton

Excerpt:

One of the nation’s oldest libraries—and one of Boston’s finest mid-19th-century buildings—recently emerged from a 21st-century metamorphosis.

The Boston Athenaeum was established in 1807 by a group of forward-looking merchants dedicated to reading materials, newspapers, and learning. It was not a private men’s club, though it was membership-driven.

“The founders and first shares were in men’s names, but they were really family memberships,” says Leah Rosovsky, director of the Athenaeum. “In 1822 the first woman owned a proprietorship in her name.” Over time, its members—educated through its library and personal interactions—were met with great success. “Its purpose was not to be social, but to increase people’s access to knowledge,” she says. Moreover, its members were civic-minded. The Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts evolved from Athenaeum members.

Read the full article in Traditional Building.

04.12.2023

Boston Globe – At the Athenaeum: Boston on fire then, the Athenaeum renovated now

At the Athenaeum: Boston on fire then, the Athenaeum renovated now

An exhibition looks at the Great Boston Fire of 1872, another shows the library spiffing up

By Mark Feeney Globe Staff, Updated April 12, 2023

Read the full article here.

Over the course of 20 hours on Nov. 9-10, 1872, much of what is now Downtown Crossing and the Financial District burned down. What became known as the Great Boston Fire destroyed 776 buildings, consuming 65 acres of the city’s main commercial district. That area is nearly as large as Boston Common and the Public Garden combined.

“Revisiting the Ruins: The Great Boston Fire of 1872″ looks at the conflagration and its aftermath. The exhibition, which runs through July 29 at the Boston Athenaeum, does double duty. It’s art show as history lesson, it’s history lesson as art show, and quite good at both.

The show’s curator is the Athenaeum’s Christina Michelon.

“Revisiting” comprises some 70 items. They include, as one might expect, photographs, paintings, prints, and a map. There are also 36 stereographs. A stereograph is a pair of very similar photographs which, when viewed through a stereoscope, give an illusion of depth. In a visitor-friendly touch, three viewers are available for use.

“Reviewing” also includes things one might not expect: a key to a building destroyed in the fire, a militia pass allowing the bearer entry to the burnt district, a teenager’s journal, a piece of sheet music, and a “relic” of the fire: a piece of once-melted metal, wrapped in newsprint and string. It’s like a present one might find in Vulcan’s Christmas stocking. Best of all, in an inspired curatorial flourish, the fire alarm in the gallery (a Simplex TrueAlert) gets a wall label. It’s a reminder of the continuity between Boston then and Boston now — and of how far fire prevention has come.

The title “Revisiting the Ruins” has a double meaning. It describes what the show is doing but also what many of the works in the show were doing. Only James Wells Champney’s pencil sketch “Rooftop View of the Great Boston Fire, November 10, 1872″ was made as the fire was occurring. This means the show is as much about the fire’s aftermath as the fire itself. That may seem like an odd distinction today, when news media operate in real time. Back then, technological limitations dictated otherwise.

To give just one example, newspapers and magazines as yet didn’t have the means to reproduce photographs. Rather, an engraving would be made from a photograph, and that’s what readers would see. The show presents both James Wallace Black’s panoramic view of the devastation and an illustration closely derived from it which ran in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.

That weekly magazine was based in New York. Coverage of the fire extended as far as England and France. The Nov. 30, 1872, issue of The Illustrated London News ran three engravings of the fire based on Black’s work. Both the photographs and the engravings are on display.

Black’s 13 photographs are the heart of the show. They’re straightforward and unflinching. The urban moonscape they capture looks like nothing so much as a war zone. The presence in the show of a photograph Alexander Gardner had taken seven years earlier of Richmond in ruins underscores the resemblance. Memories of the Civil War must have been in many Bostonians’ minds, as well as an awareness of a more recent event. The Great Chicago Fire had taken place just 13 months before.

Astonishingly, reconstruction was completed within two years (a good part of the rubble was used as landfill in Boston Harbor and to extend Atlantic Avenue). Much of downtown hadn’t been destroyed, of course. The steeple of Old South Meeting House is visible in several photographs. And the fire was contained just two blocks from the Athenaeum.

A very different sort of reconstruction is on display in Tira Khan’s “Reading the Room: Reconstructing the Boston Athenaeum,” which runs through May 13. Khan’s eight photographs are very handsome, with a fullness of color that’s almost tactile.

Her goal was to document the library’s recent renovation. “Patched and Spackled” is not a title one would normally associate with a view of the Athenaeum’s interior, though others, like “Circulation” and “The Paper Room” one would. These photographs, not unlike that fire-alarm wall label in “Revisiting the Ruins,” testify to continuity, in this case institutional.

REVISITING THE RUINS: The Great Boston Fire of 1872

READING THE ROOM: Reconstructing the Boston Athenaeum

At: Boston Athenaeum, 10½ Beacon St., through July 29 and May 13, respectively. 617-227-0270, bostonathenaeum.org

04.05.2023

WBUR Radio Boston: New exhibit will examine the lasting legacy of the Great Boston Fire of 1872

A new exhibition opening on April 7 at the Boston Athenæum explores the impact of the Great Boston Fire of 1872. The blaze burned for 12 hours, burning down nearly 800 buildings and causing billions of dollars in damage in today’s figures.

Boston historian and author Anthony Sammarco and Christina Michelon, associate curator of special collections at the Boston Athenæum joined us to talk about the fire and the exhibit called “Revisiting the Ruins: The Great Boston Fire of 1872”

You can listen to the interview and read the transcript here.

11.14.2022

Boston Athenaeum, a remnant of the city’s Brahmin past, looks to engage an increasingly diverse population

Published in The Boston Globe, November 14, 2022

Boston Athenaeum, a remnant of the city’s Brahmin past, looks to engage an increasingly diverse population

By Brian MacQuarrie Globe Staff, Updated November 14, 2022, 7:39 pm

Excerpt: Sitting catty-corner from the State House, the landmark Boston Athenaeum can resemble a grand survivor of a bygone era, a remnant of the Brahmin past amid the shiny high-rises and sweeping demographic changes that mark the 21st-century city.

Busts of stolid, studied men cast an inanimate gaze upon members of the private library as they read in absolute silence. Row upon row of books from a 500,000-volume circulating collection — as well as 100,000 rare books, maps, and manuscripts, and 100,000 works of art — offer a vast well of options for research and reflection.

But behind the walls of this 215-year-old institution, something else is afoot, and it’s not limited to the Athenaeum’s renovation and expansion into an adjacent building. The venerable institution is looking to broaden its programming, engage more of the city’s increasingly diverse population, and even be more transparent about its own history.

Read the full article in The Boston Globe.

06.09.2022

Town & Country – Boston Athenaeum Turns the Page

The Boston Athenaeum Turns the Page

by Mark Rozzo in Town & Country Magazine, June 9, 2022

Excerpt: For more than 200 years the library has been a gathering spot for writers and intellectuals. Now a thoughtful renovation aims to preserve it as a place for future generations to become part of history simply by walking in the door.

Read the full article in Town & Country