History, Natural History & the Arts
Pictures of street hawkers with their trade shouts recorded in captions of poetry or prose are known as “Cries.” They first appeared in Paris around 1500. This early creation of an urban iconography included socially marginal people such as vagrants, beggars, prostitutes, and others.
Fifty years later, these images were established as a stylistic category across Europe. Eventually, they would make their way to New York. [Read more…] about Urban Cries: Street Hawkers’ Shouts in New York & London
The Sembrich in Bolton on Lake George has received a donation of paintbrushes and palate knives used by American Painter Johann Berthelsen.
The brushes were originally a gift to the artist from Marcella Sembrich, who originally presented them to Berthelsen at the time that he was working on a series of paintings that she commissioned. [Read more…] about Sembrich Receives Unique Donation from The Berthelsen Conservancy
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Feedback
I am not breaking apart
I am not coming undone
I am not washed up
I am breaking open
And it’s about time
It’s okay
I trust my path
On this episode of The Historians Podcast, Ashley Hopkins-Benton recounts the life of sculptor and stone worker Henry DiSpirito, who became artist in residence at Utica College. Hopkins-Benton is author of Breathing Life Into Stone: The Sculpture of Henry DiSpirito. She is also a senior historian and curator of social history at the New York State Museum in Albany. [Read more…] about Utica Sculptor Henry DiSpirito
The Greece Historical Society (GHS) is the recipient of two grants totaling $30,000 to fund a Cultural Resource Survey of the architecture of noted Rochester African American architect Thomas W. Boyde, Jr.
The grants were awarded by the Preservation League of New York State and their program partners at the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and the Rochester Area Community Foundation. [Read more…] about Upstate Historians Shine Light On A Noted Black Architect
The Preservation League of NYS has announced this year’s Excellence in Historic Preservation Award winners. The Excellence in Historic Preservation Awards recognize notable achievements in historic preservation throughout New York State. [Read more…] about Preservation League Excellence Award Winners 2020
The early history of the city of New York’s vaunted theater district provides yet another illustration of how oft-repeated narratives become accepted truths. On the website of the New York Preservation Archive Project, we find the following:
“The Broadway Theater District originated in the early 1900s as theaters began to move from Union Square and Madison Square Garden further uptown to the Times Square area because of its cheaper real estate.” [Read more…] about The Odd Couple Who Paved the Way for Modern Broadway
In fiction, poetry or song, houses are treated as living organisms. They are noble, respectable, or infamous. There are houses of high rank and those of low repute – houses have human characteristics and their individual biographies.
The Isokon Building in Hampstead tells a striking tale of recent historical events. At the time of completion, it was one of the few modernist dwellings in London’s cityscape; the block of flats housed a number of notable refugees from Nazi Germany; almost simultaneously it served as a recruitment office for Soviet spies. Crucial aspects of post-war American cultural and political developments originated in a few flats in this leafy corner of North West London. [Read more…] about Concrete, Plywood and Soviet Spies
Explication
Adelaide Crapsey, poet near to death
and tubercular, wrote: “I’ll not
be patient. I will not lie still.”
Strained — her tight, short blasts of breath.
Outside her window headstones dot
her imaged landscape all must fill
one day, abruptly and forever, patient,
lying as still as microbiology
will allow. Mission means “sent.”
Do we have one? Are we? Ask the sill
of Adelaide’s thin window on eternity.
It glosses by transparency
the point between a breath
and no breath, where redundancy
ends, yet we become it — Death
as she bore Sweet Christ, all our beds are made.